


Deadlock

by Guede



Series: Dead Men Tell No Tales [6]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - No Werewolves, Amorality, BAMF Lydia Martin, BAMF Stiles, Bondage, Breathplay, Chastity Device, Collars, Dark Lydia Martin, Dark Stiles Stilinski, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub Undertones, Drugs, Duct Tape, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Gun Kink, Humiliation, Incest, Laura Hale Lives, M/M, Mind Games, Multi, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Piercings, Rough Sex, Sensory Deprivation, Sex Toys, Unhealthy Relationships, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 05:08:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21192077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: The one where Lydia and Stiles kill somebody from their past and get a little emotional about it (and not about the routine murder-for-hire work they do in between sexually manipulating Chris Argent and the Hales).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, for the last time: darkfic ahead, please check the warning tags.
> 
> This will not make any sense whatsoever if you haven't read the rest of the series.

It’s not about sex. You’d have to be exceptionally shallow-minded to think that, considering they can afford not only whatever type they want, but also to take the type they want up and drop it whenever they want, rather than dragging it around the world after them, with the literal and other baggage that entails. But it’s also not about power, or control. That’s far too crude a reading of the dynamic.

Derek’s barely halfway down the basement steps when Stiles levels a gun at the back of his head and cocks the hammer. The space isn’t finished and it’s dusty, clouds of it kicking up from the scuff of Derek’s feet, but that’s not why Derek’s eyes haze over.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, cynical grin not quite masking the light in his eyes, either. He prods at Derek with the gun, even though Derek’s hands are already in the air. “Keep on going.”

“I cleaned up,” Derek mutters, truculent despite his obvious arousal, slouching his way down the rest of the steps. He hunches and rolls his shoulders to shrug out of his jacket, getting it halfway down his arms before Stiles snags a handful of its leather, pulls it the rest of the way off.

Pulls Derek down onto his knees, square in the middle of the plastic tarp they’d taped across part of the concrete floor. Derek grunts, putting his hands back over his head, and then again as Stiles drags his arms down and back behind him. He’s twisting slightly at the waist, pelvis canting minutely forward whenever Stiles wrenches a wrist. His breathing’s sped up, and he flicks his tongue out between his lips as Stiles runs the muzzle of the gun under his chin, forcing that up and pressing his head backwards so he’s grinding it into Stiles’ groin.

“Lyds?” Stiles says.

“You’re fifteen minutes late and don’t even try to say it was traffic, I know what the GPS says,” Lydia says, not that she thinks it’s going to mean a damn thing to Stiles. That’s the problem with him, he always likes to ride the margin.

But he’s never been wrong yet about how wide that is, and it’s saved them more than once, as well as made a good third of their money. Anyway, she needs to finish up this transaction so they won’t have to work during the Venice Biennale, and if left waiting, Stiles is just going to make an even bigger mess. She kicks him the roll of electrical tape so he’ll have that to keep his hands busy instead of the gun.

Contrary to what the movies would have you think, money laundering has nothing to do with archaic bill-counting machines and backdoor deals with greasy underworld figures who still dress as if the Pacino _Scarface_ is the height of fashion. It’s about excellent tax lawyers and accountants, an in-depth knowledge of the global banking system, and access to the best, fastest financial-services algorithms killing for hire can get you. It takes more than just a little _math_ to get by.

When Lydia finally sits back, wrinkling her nose at the creaking lawn chair they’d found for her behind the boiler, Derek’s stripped naked and rolling on his back, arched over bound wrists so his glazed eyes loll vaguely in her direction. He’s not seeing her—he’s far busier with the man straddling his waist, casually sinking down onto his cock. Derek’s bare feet periodically lift, picking up the plastic sheet as it sticks to their soles, and then slap back down. Slurred curses drip out of his mouth, particularly when Stiles stops halfway down, makes an impatient noise, and contorts around to reach into the shadowed space between the bottom of his ass and the trembling flat of Derek’s groin.

Stiles rolled one of those latex sheaths down Derek’s cock before he started. Lydia can see it, especially as Stiles squats up and starts to play with Derek, probably tugging at those ball piercings, and Derek exchanges the cursing for urgent moans. “Fuck, Stiles,” he finally manages to mumble. “Fuck, I’m sorry, all right, he fucking—”

“Yeah, yeah, he always fucking, and we _always_ fuck after,” Stiles snorts. He pulls his hand back up, holds it over Derek’s face till the man blearily registers, then flicks the fingers at Derek. “Mixed messages, I know, but here’s a thought—can’t do the ‘after’ if we have to trip over to the black-market doc to get a knife out of your back, can we? I mean, sure, there’s always blowing you while you’re still coming off the Vicodin, but drooling unconsciousness isn’t actually my flavor of medical kink.”

Derek licks his lips and instead of letting him answer, Stiles reaches down and wraps a hand around his neck. Then jerks down, putting weight on it—not all, some’s going onto the hand Stiles has braced over the gun lying next to Derek’s head—at the same time their groins go flush. Gasping, Derek wrenches up against the choking hand, then shudders back, the sheeting rippling up under his tapping shoulders.

Lydia glances at the output scrolling across her screen, then at her phone. Laura’s staying with Chris in France this week; the French are contradictory, claiming sexual permissiveness while still worshipping at the altar of traditional values, and lending her to Chris gives them both a chance to run those hypocritical fools out of business. And also sometimes Lydia doesn’t want that kind of company.

She gets up and walks over to the edge of the plastic. Some of the tape holding that down is peeling off, thanks to how much Derek’s squirming, and she deliberately presses her foot down on the spot. Stiles looks up, his hand still loosely encircling Derek’s throat, hips rocking against Derek’s waist.

“Nothing happened,” he says. He’s panting a little. A fresh trail of sweat’s winding its way over the dried traces of previous trails at the side of his face. “He cleaned up. Didn’t the GPS say so?”

“The GPS and Peter did, yes,” Lydia says dryly. She folds her arms over her chest. “I ran low on coffee, so I let him out.”

Derek startles, awareness feebly stirring in his eyes, but then Stiles looks down, makes a low, amused, shushing noise at him, at the same time he picks up the gun and touches the tip of the muzzle to Derek’s upper lip. The other man mouths at it like a baby with a bottle, then lets his head sag back as Stiles runs the muzzle up along the bridge of his nose, over his brow, back through his sweat-soaked hair. When the gun comes off, Derek’s entire body sags into a begging moan.

Excellent genetics, Lydia’s not immune to that. The bone structure in the face, the flat hard planes of muscle, defined with clear but soft-looking lines into broad pectorals, bunched abdominals. She catches herself studying the twitch of Derek’s groin muscles arrowing down under Stiles’ body, the way they seize up as Stiles humps against Derek, and then looks up to see Stiles watching her.

He’s possessive, in the sense that he wants it very clear what is and isn’t his. He pushes the gun aside and cradles both hands under Derek’s skull, fisting them in the thick black hair, tilting up Derek’s lust-addled expression for her. Showing her, because he’s also easily amused when he thinks she’s showing something she’d rather not. And he likes to share, in his way. With her, anyway. He used to slip her random research papers he’d write up on his own time, not for class, just for her personal interest when she wasn’t pretending to be a socialite-in-waiting.

Now he slips one hand down Derek’s front, fingers straying here and there from the centerline to tease a nipple, pet at a rib, circle a hipbone. Derek’s head rolls to the side and when she takes a step forward, she’s close enough that the tips of his hair are sprinkling her toes with sweat. She’s wearing espadrilles, expensive, likely to hold stains.

She stands where she is and Stiles grins at her again, throwing his own head back, his hand rising from Derek to grasp his own cock. The two of them don’t often have sex together these days, except for Chris, but that doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t mean lack of chemistry—of alchemy, more accurately, since objective science hardly explains what it means when she raises her hand and puts it to his cheek and he closes his eyes and so does she and their mouths press together once again over a writhing, pleading, utterly at their mercy body.

She shares with him, too. That gets a lot closer to it than all that outdated Freudian selfishness.

* * *

Derek’s rolled onto his side on the plastic, knees pulled up. His cockhead’s flushed a dark, engorged red above the black latex, and whenever Stiles pets it, he stirs out of the apparent stupor he’s fallen into, hissing and rubbing his face into the sheet. Stiles wrapped a piece of plastic over his eyes and then taped over it, and it seems to have the same effect as tossing a towel over a birdcage, since Derek occasionally grunts a ‘fuck’ but otherwise hasn’t said a word. He just twists and arches against his bound hands, Stiles’ half-dried come flaking off his belly.

“So it works out, actually,” Stiles is telling Lydia, sitting cross-legged next to Derek. Minimally cleaned up, half-dressed, but he has his gloves on as he taps at his tablet. “Sure, we’ll have extra clean-up tonight, but it saves us both a disposal tomorrow _and_ pretty much all of the alibi set-up.”

“Assuming it’s actually a coincidence, and not just our client getting ahead of themselves,” Lydia says, checking her phone. Chris is texting her that he has feelers out and should know by morning his time.

Stiles shrugs. He can be infuriatingly blasé about improvisation at times, considering he’s the one who first introduced Lydia to planned campaigns. She’d known tactics before that, of course, but long-term, coherent _strategy_…and when the mood strikes him, he’s still fanatical about that MMORPG. But then, he tolerates her jostling for good seats at fashion shows. “Yeah, so it probably is that too, but it’s obviously just them getting antsy about covering up their tracks and as long as they’re not doing it by selling us out, do we really care that they’re doing the same thing they’re paying us for?”

“As _long_ as we don’t end up spending our profit margin on when they panic,” Lydia mutters. Her laptop is beeping.

She returns to it to check the GPS tracking just as Peter comes down the stairs. He calls out something appropriately ingratiating as he brings over the tray of drinks, to which she reminds him that her letting him out has nothing to do with what Stiles wants to do with him. Lydia doesn’t look up at the slight, alarmed in-suck of breath, or at Stiles’ confirming laugh, or at the other noises that follow. She’s too concerned with making sure that they’ll get out of this dingy basement on time, with all the delays that she knows Stiles’ antics are going to add.

Stiles ties up Peter the same as he did Derek, then drags Derek on top of him and pushes Derek’s cock into him before fucking Derek a second time. Derek and Peter make out frantically, tearing at each other’s mouths with the displaced lust that Stiles isn’t allowing their dicks to spit out, till Lydia comes over a second time.

“Fifteen minutes,” she tells Stiles.

He flops his head up to look at her, then wipes sweat out of his eyes. Blinks, then nods and forces Derek out of Peter. He strips off the latex sheath from Derek and tosses it into the center of the sheet, then looks at Lydia again. Resettles his grip on Derek’s hips, over the streaks of red-going-purple his fingernails have already scored into them, holding the man back.

“Wanna help?” he says.

She raises a brow at him and Stiles shrugs. “I don’t know, I just feel like you’ve been dropping in on Chris a lot lately,” he says. Beneath him, Derek’s pressed his head into Peter’s shoulder and appears nearly unconscious, but Peter’s listening, albeit with wavering attention. “Trying to be fair, and I know you always want to shove something in his mouth.”

“Which is your responsibility, or so you’ve claimed,” Lydia says. “You generally do a reasonable job.”

Stiles smiles at her, sheepish, the smile of forgetting to text her homework assignments and to tell her of extra corpses. “But not _perfect_, is it?”

“You’re incorrigible,” Lydia says, as she hikes up her skirt and moves her feet to straddle Peter’s head.

Derek grunts and his hair brushes against Lydia’s knee as he moves. Stiles slaps his ass and he hisses, stills, but she can sense his usual simmering, confused resentment. She ignores it, settling down on Peter’s mouth.

She ignores the slight, noiseless, only palpable by touch exclamation that Peter makes, just before his lips and tongue strain up to attend to her. The man is thinking it over, trying to fit it into what he knows and what he presumes about her and Stiles’ relationship, and about his and Derek’s own arrangement with Stiles. Trying to understand whether this means he’s lost ground, gained it, or something entirely different. Deep down, under the undeniable intelligence, Peter is completely terrified of being given away.

But, Lydia thinks as she takes her first deeper breath, feels the lap of Peter’s mouth send tremors up from her clit into her belly, that’s not her problem. Stiles and she share, but they both take care of their own business. And while Lydia might appreciate, even admire, Derek and Peter are wholly _Stiles’_ business. Oh, she might be amused that he’s less inclined to share them than he’s been with others in the past, but she’s not remotely offended. She doesn’t really want them, and Stiles does. So it’s just something to note.

When their mark finally shows up, there’s barely room for him on the plastic sheet. Stiles drags Derek and Peter, still bound, still coming down from long-denied orgasms, out of the way as Lydia topples him onto the opposite corner. The furthest splash of blood just misses the concrete.

“Just like the old days, huh?” Stiles says. He pulls out a knife and then, chuckling, gives a startled Peter a reassuring pat before he starts to cut the other men loose. “DIY murder on the weekends.”

“I despise nostalgia. There’s nothing charming about mistakes,” Lydia says, stepping off the sheet. She pauses to clean Peter’s spit off her thighs, then pulls her skirt down and calls for a clean-up crew.


	2. Chapter 2

She and Stiles split up after the job. He’s off with Derek and Peter to handle one of the quid pro quo hits they occasionally grant the various covert agencies of the world, while she takes a redeye charter back across the Atlantic to France. Which is also part of the quid pro quo—you can make a _lot_ of money killing people, but sometimes it’s better to take payment in kind. For one, it’s easier to keep off the books.

For two, it keeps _them_ off the books. They’re pragmatic, not idealists, and no amount of money or blackmail or even firepower, when you’re only talking about two people, is going to hold off all the governments for all the agendas. But even pragmatists who sign up for a government position, however unacknowledged, end up at the mercy of ever-shifting political winds, and neither Lydia nor Stiles took up their current career so they could end up beholden to some greedy old man’s machinations. Good God. If that’s where they end it all, then they could have just popped some barbiturates and then drunk themselves senseless over Scott’s grave. So call them professionals exchanging favors, strictly unofficial.

Chris picks Lydia up from the airport. Laura’s in shotgun, and as Lydia slides into the backseat, the other woman hands back a little wooden box from the finest sushi chef currently in Paris, a bottle of artisan water that costs nearly as much, and one of those old-fashioned receipts, written on paper that’s thinner than printer paper and thicker than tissue. “Says you’ll get the dress back in the morning,” Laura says, her curiosity all over her face. “Wanted me to assure you they’ll do the same quality job as they always do, and all the stains should be dealt with to your satisfaction.”

Lydia drinks the water, opens the sushi box, and then sets both on her lap as she tucks the receipt into her purse. “What about the extra bodies?”

“All new hires on short notice, nobody with roots,” Chris answers, as he steers the sleek towncar into the nighttime traffic. “Just beefing up for a turf war, like Stiles thought. Just makes it more convincing that he got caught out by the other side.”

“Which is pretty much what happened anyway, even if everybody’s going to be wrong about who did the catching,” Laura says. She’s still twisted around, hanging half over her chair, her breasts squeezed up and nearly out the top of her lowcut blouse. She lets one arm dangle down so that her fingertips sway near the hem of Lydia’s skirt, and then pouts a little when Lydia merely continues to eat the sushi. “So I heard you were hands-on this time.”

Lydia uncrosses her legs, moving her knee away from Laura, and then looks out the window. They’ve left the airport but haven’t quite reached the haze that bubbles over the city, even at this hour. “Did you.”

Chris glances over at Laura but makes no move to pull her down. He doesn’t even look particularly concerned, although it’s clear he thinks she’s misstepping. They’re interesting in that way—they’ve developed a rapport as tenacious as the one between Derek and Peter, and certainly Lydia expects them to kill for each other just as thoughtlessly as the other pair do. But they’re not nearly as anxious about keeping tabs on each other, not the way Derek and Peter are, as if deep down, it’s all still part of some terrible, terribly bloody, romance. Even though that’s exactly what it is. 

“Yeah,” Laura says, shifting. She’s growing cautious but that curious streak of hers still has her eyeing Lydia. “You know that, anyway.”

“I have better things to do than obsessively read your texts to your family,” Lydia says. Her back aches, and tiny twinges are running up and down her shins: even the most luxurious charter plane is still a cramped place to spend the better part of a day.

Laura laughs and tosses her hair, like the high school queen her yearbook said she’d once been. It’s a sign that she’s getting more nervous, reverting to those immature tactics. “Okay. Right, then…”

Chris distracts her, asking in a low voice if she can answer his phone for him. Traffic or not, it’s not necessary and they all know it, and there’s more than a hint of petulance in the way Laura sighs and turns around. The box on Lydia’s lap overflows with darkness as Laura moves across the car, her head blocking out the light coming in through the windshield. She stays three seconds longer than necessary to take Chris’ phone from his pants pocket; Chris’ driving never wavers but he exhales quietly when she finally moves back to her seat.

Lydia picks at the sushi. She ate a little on the flight over, not enough, and she doesn’t need to see the food to feel hunger pangs, but somewhere between lifting the pieces of fish out of the box and into her mouth, that message gets lost.

“Did you want to discuss—” Chris starts.

“No,” Lydia says.

Laura, answering the call in slow, fragmented French, pauses. She shifts, then curses in English as she knocks against some part of the car. Then Chris shifts, his shoulders rising slightly above the line of the seat and spreading back, stretching himself, as if there’s some fight to be braced against. A second later, Laura dismisses the call with a few curt sentences in English.

It’s quiet in the car after that, for the rest of the drive. Some would say tense or awkward, but Lydia isn’t the one who is concerned about something, and it’s been a very long time since she gave much weight to anyone’s discomfort, if they weren’t Stiles. And Stiles is across the Atlantic.

She wonders briefly what he’s doing. Her hand moves towards her phone.

Then Lydia puts her head back against the headrest, and her hands around the sushi box. She doesn’t have to ask Stiles. He’s fine. He’s always done the lion’s share of the wetwork, right from the start, back when it was still personal, and right now he’s researching another job or in bed with one or both of Derek and Peter or haring off on one of his endless hobbies. Whichever it is, he’s not dwelling.

* * *

They’re using Chris’ family’s property, as always when one of them is in France. The townhouse is appropriately old and historic and eternally aristocratic, with tasteful modernized utilities and enough security that even Lydia feels she can leave the curtains drawn. Although, obviously, she still sits out of the line of sight of any of the rooftops across the street.

Laura’s less careful, sprawled across the daybed directly before the wide bay window. It doesn’t matter—the glass is bulletproof, and the neighboring houses bought out—but a prickle still goes across Lydia’s skin as she watches a finger of shadow stroke down the other woman’s body. Slipping over rippled silk, feathering into the lace detailing as Laura shifts position, pushing up on her elbows while letting her legs drag, her ass tensioning the negligee so it curls lovingly around the cleft of her buttocks. Laura’s breasts pillow out of the neckline, plumping themselves against the cushions.

“Stiles sent over some files, if you want to go over them now,” Chris says. He’s kneeling by the side of Lydia’s armchair, his arm hooked casually over the side so that he can point out things on Lydia’s laptop screen. As casually as he’s wearing his collar, and ignoring the swing of the leash that hangs from the ring centered under his Adam’s apple. “And you have a follow-up from—”

“I’m booked,” Lydia says without looking at him, or at the laptop screen. The shadow lying across Laura’s back shifts again, dipping between her thighs as a breeze riffles the curtains. “You know that.”

Chris doesn’t sigh. He probably knows their calendar better than they do, with how he’s set himself to learn not just their preferences, but also their proclivities. Stiles and Peter and Derek are headed south and Stiles never gets out of Mexico on time, so Lydia will end up moving her meetings in various former Soviet satellite states so that she can fly back to the U.S. and cover his prep work for the next job. So there’s no point in Chris suggesting he rebook Lydia; there’s no room in the schedule even for that.

“You could take it,” Laura says. She combs the hair back from her face, bundling over her far shoulder as she twists to face them. She’s speaking to Chris. One of her breasts has slid free of the negligee, its nipple peaking above the lace.

He doesn’t look over at her, still preoccupied with the timelines on Lydia’s laptop, but a slight flex works its way down his body. He’s more clothed than she is: his white dress shirt’s been crumpled by her hands out of its crispness, but it still hangs from his shoulders, front half-unbuttoned so that the sway of the leash dips in and out of it. The black silk pajamas barely cling to his hips, especially when he stretches up to reach the keyboard, but they do cling.

“We don’t need the money. It’s just a favor, and we’re not in their debt,” Chris says. He has to lean far enough over that his breath leaves a faint misty mark on the laptop screen.

It’s a little humid, Lydia admits. She can feel the air sticking at her hairline, in the small of her back where the armchair cushion presses her dress to her, in the small, warm hollow that forms when her panties stretch over the folds of her cunt. She could tell Chris to adjust the air-conditioning.

“It can probably keep anyway,” Chris adds, blocking off the time on the calendar for Lydia’s not-yet-booked return trip.

Laura laughs. Tugs her hair, pulling it further over her shoulder, and then reaches across herself to toy with the strap of her negligee. Her fingers slide down it to the escaped breast, and then curve around its softness, thumbnail pushing up against the stiff-looking nipple. She’s still looking at Chris. “If it’s just because you don’t want to get your hands dirty, maybe Lydia will let me stay back a week. I just get in the way when they’re all yelling at my brother.”

“Did Derek do something?” Chris says, looking up with a frown.

“Not yet,” Laura says, brows arching. She rolls her shoulder so that the strap slides down it and fully frees her breast, cupping it so that the nipple traps itself between two fingertips. “But the last time he and Peter were in Mexico—well, you helped clean that up, you should know—”

When Chris finally cranes around the laptop to look at her, Lydia reaches out and takes him by the back of the neck. Under the collar, avoiding leather worn so silky that it’s a liability to a grip.

Chris tenses immediately, sucking his breath, and then lets out his air in a long, low sigh as his shoulders droop, his head rolls back into the hold. Lydia can’t see his expression but she can read it in how Laura, just as silenced, bites her lip over lust-blown pupils. They’d been talking as if Lydia wasn’t there, but it’s not rudeness.

It’s not necessarily _polite_, either, and Lydia watches them think that over, what they did, what they’d been doing, as she slowly, methodically, sinks her nails into Chris’ neck. He doesn’t make a sound but the muscles in his shoulders twitch, while over on the daybed, Laura’s fingers slip down her breast, pinkish streaks left in their wake where her nails have scraped too close. Then all at once Laura starts, hissing between her teeth, and presses her fingers to the streaks, as if only just realizing what she’s done.

At the same time Chris starts to fold, one leg pushing forward, his weight shifting under Lydia’s grip, starting to pivot. He’ll turn in between her legs if she lets him, if she simply pushes her feet apart. Push up her skirt, find her soft points, do all the work for her. He always does. He wants her to lay it all at his feet, on his back, over his shoulders. Still the knight looking for someone to give aid to, for all that he’s long since broken, his armor deliberately shed, his weapons turned towards himself.

It crosses Lydia’s mind. She’s never been one for the fairytales, even before, and she is tired tonight. She’s not so inhuman that she doesn’t want to simply stop sometimes, stop and drown everything out in mindless physicality. She may have more toys than the rest of the world, but at the end of the day, sex isn’t about the ritual. Sex is about sex.

Lydia makes an irritated noise in her throat. It never passes her lips but Chris senses it, enough that before she even digs her thumbnail in under his jaw, his weight is swinging back. His feet are already curling under him when she pulls him up onto them, gets out of the chair.

“Hmmm?” Laura says, a flicker of wariness crossing her face, as they walk over to her. Still, she rolls onto her back, her legs wantonly open, one arm going up and back under her head to cushion it while the other still cages that one breast.

Chris is puzzled too but he keeps his mouth shut. He always keeps his mouth shut, even when it’d be better—Lydia stifles the flare of unmerited temper. Not that she thinks being kind to Chris will help him. Not that she wants to _help_ him. But beating him simply to provoke an exclamation is pointless. If that had ever worked, he’d have been buried next to his father.

“Down,” Lydia says instead, releasing Chris.

He glances at her once, as he drops onto the bed between Laura’s legs, and he’s concerned. He’s never concerned about them now. Oh, he _concerns_ himself with their business, and with the smoothing of obstacles out of its way, but that’s entirely different.

But he keeps it to himself, after that look. Puts his hands on Laura’s thighs, puts his gaze on her belly, warming as she pushes up on her elbows and looks back at him, lips still swollen from her biting them, tongue flicking out from between. She’s the one who makes the low, guttural groan as he runs his hands up her thighs, under the negligee, presses them apart in the same motion. One thumb rubs her clit, the other dips into her, then withdraws as she gasps and grinds down into it, pulling up a slick trail onto the clit that’s beginning to plump up between the two thumbs.

“Fuck, you’re good at that,” Laura moans, arching back against the daybed. Her feverish eyes sweep out to Lydia, and she keeps staring as she kneads the mattress. Pleading for something, wondering. Her gaze feels like a bunched handful of tiny hooks, scratching and scrabbling and ultimately sliding off. 

Laura snaps her head over, even though Lydia still hasn’t touched her. She lets out a ragged, frustrated noise, then, with an animal suddenness that puts an answering feral light in Chris’ eyes, jerks up and grabs at Chris’ leash, dragging him up onto her. 

The strap runs between collar and cockring and even Chris can’t help a pain-harshed exhale at the yank, but he doesn’t take it out on Laura. She’s rough: pulling off his shirt, scattering the buttons, her nails leaving runs in the silk when she strips him of his pants. He’s deliberate: flicking her nipples with his thumbs, then rubbing circles over her belly, stretching the negligee nearly transparent, as he allows her to take in his cock but then pins her, keeping them both from moving, no matter her curses.

She takes her nails to his arms and legs, then leaves pink stripes up the backs of his shoulderblades before seizing his head in both hands, dragging him down for a prolonged kiss. Her negligee soaks through with sweat till it seems like tissue-paper—Lydia almost catches herself listening for the first rip—still Chris won’t let her fuck herself to orgasm. 

He’s waiting for Lydia. She looks at them, at how appealing they are. She could lose herself that way too, if she wanted. She hasn’t forgotten how to do that, hasn’t forgotten that she _used_ to do that, to want that, to seek that. Senselessness. The whole idea of falling apart together, and never caring who would be there to pick up the pieces. 

To watch for the snipers. Lydia looks up at the window and outside, at the dim lines of the roofs across the street. She shifts forward on her leading foot and Chris’ breath stutters—even his will isn’t infallible and he’s strained to his limit, waiting for her—and then puts her hand on his back. 

And leans on it, as she stretches over him and pulls shut the curtains. Laura lets out a dying moan, unable to stop moving, wrenching herself side to side and making it worse as Chris pants over her, trembling with the effort of keeping his hands on her waist and no lower.

Lydia used to climb into messes like that. She used to be happy that way. And of course she’s not like that now.

When she settles back on her feet, she reaches in between the two of them and frees Chris’ cock with a quick twist of the wrist. Chris groans then, his hands fumbling down to the mattress as he slams sharply up into Laura, and Laura’s head lolls to the side, her unfocused eyes vaguely in Lydia’s direction as Lydia turns away.

Two steps from the door, Chris makes a strange, choked noise. It almost sounds as if he might want to call out to her.

Lydia takes another step and then pauses as she puts her hand on the doorknob. She doesn’t turn around, and behind her, Laura lets out a long, rough cry, then falls into a series of gasping breaths. Chris hisses, but he doesn’t say anything, and Lydia goes out of the room, leaving the door open.

There are no snipers across the street. She’s sure of that, has set the sensors herself. She trusts that she has no reason to watch, but still—comfort. It’s less of a luxury in their world than a danger sign.

* * *

“You in a mood?” Laura asks Lydia later, freshly showered and crawling into bed as if she’d like to put her head on Lydia’s lap.

She’s changed too, into a loose t-shirt and cotton pajama pants. The shirt’s neck scoops nearly to her nipples and the cotton is thin enough that her pubic hair, still regrowing from the last time Lydia sugared it, shades through—and the ensemble costs more than a college student would spend on textbooks for a full year—but the effect is still comfort, not sensuality. When the shirt’s hem rides up, Lydia can glimpse bruises where Chris held Laura down. 

“Mood?” Lydia says. She keeps reading the documents Stiles sent. Part of the research for the favor Stiles will be doing down in Mexico, and hopefully, not creating a reason to ask for favors back. If Lydia’s honest, they’ve only been more successful than the Hales by virtue of covering their expenses where that country is concerned, and not really any neater. Mexico is the assassin’s version of Schrödinger’s cat, Stiles sometimes says: either you know what you’re doing or you survive, but never both.

Laura hesitates, where she’s lying near Lydia’s hip. Shifting in place, one hand going back to absently rub at her bruises, till Lydia looks impatiently up and then Laura suddenly pushes back off the bed. “Want something to drink?”

Vodka, Lydia thinks, wishing Russia still paid the way it used to, when oil prices were up. “If Chris has something already open.”

The other woman pauses again. “Okay,” she says, and then pads off.

When she comes back a few minutes later, she, predictably, has Chris with her. After sex Chris generally doesn’t come crawling unless Lydia waves for him to, one of the few times he doesn’t press. And he does press, for all his submissiveness. It keeps Stiles fascinated. Gives him a standard of comparison for what he’s doing, much more methodically, with Peter and Derek.

Chris holds out a glass of rosé and Lydia presses her lips together, then sighs and reaches over. She takes his wrist instead of the glass and he gets on the bed with them, hesitating only briefly when she uses the bend of her wrist to push his head away from her laptop and toward her knees. He’s undeniably useful, and experienced, but she and Stiles had nearly everything worked out before they went to him anyway. She doesn’t _need_ him to review her work.

She’s being petty. Lydia stops working again, just looking at her screen, and Laura slides up next to her, pillowing her head by Lydia’s elbow. “Peter’s been bitching about not having enough information.”

“He’s complaining about that _now_?” Lydia says. She puts her fingers back on the keyboard, then lifts them as Chris accidentally shifts the laptop, trying to settle himself. He freezes, then carefully nestles his head on her thigh.

“Well, since he’s running strategy, more or less, while Stiles takes Derek out murdering,” Laura says. Her breath is warm on Lydia’s arm, and when Lydia moves it to take a sip of the wine, her hair slides into the hollow Lydia’s elbow left in the pillow. “Actually I think he’s just doing it because he can’t complain about the last job, which is what is really bothering him.”

“I gave him more of a file than the CIA has,” Chris mutters. He’s in another set of silk pajama pants, no shirt, just the collar, with a strip of black lace loosely tied to the silver ring at the back.

It’s an oddity, and not only because it’s been so haphazardly knotted that Lydia can’t decide whether the intended effect was a bow or merely whatever knot would do the job. Chris has his vanities—the stud earrings are _vanity_, since the dead damned well don’t care what he does to himself—but they generally don’t surface so…daintily, witness the renovation of his family’s country estate into an ascetic fortress. He’s subtle, Chris, but not one for meaningless frippery.

Laura shrugs and her head slides down the pillow to rest against Lydia’s upper arm. Then she reaches over, begins to smooth her fingers through the hair at the back of Chris’ head. “Yeah, well, you know Peter when he’s got a puzzle. And Stiles did go and tell him that that guy, you used to know him.”

Chris twists sharply around, not minding Lydia’s laptop at all, not even when his shoulder strikes it and Lydia has to lift it off her lap entirely. He’s alarmed, and looking at Laura, and Laura is giving him a mulish expression back. Laura’s capable of subtlety too, when properly directed, but she doesn’t prefer it. Sometimes Lydia finds that amusing.

Sometimes she finds it infuriating. But right now, with the two of them tensed around her, Lydia still feels tired. Holding secrets is overhead, in their line of work, and like most overhead, it’s more effort than support.

“Stiles,” Lydia starts, intending to remind them that Stiles says things for his own reasons, according to his own ideas, to carry out his own damned idiot impulses. And then she changes her mind. “We did know him. He went to our high school.”

She feels more than sees Laura’s eyes round. Chris is facing Lydia, and he’s less surprised—possibly not surprised at all, since he had the chance to retrace Allison’s footsteps before they took measures there—but the tension in his gaze shifts. He knows it’s no better, and a good deal worse, to feel sympathy for Lydia than it is to fear her.

Lydia’s expecting Laura to say more, but Laura doesn’t. A moment later Lydia puts the laptop on the bedside table and rises and goes into the adjoining bathroom.

When she returns, Laura is still lying against the pillows but Chris has moved over to kneel in the space that Lydia left. They’ve been talking and have obviously settled things between themselves—Laura has a loose grip on Chris’ forearm, and Chris has one hand braced against the headboard as he leans over her, both of them angling themselves with a familiarity that excludes true hostility. And then Lydia remembers the lace—the edging from Laura’s negligee.

Chris is the one to catch the small plastic bottle Lydia tosses. He turns it right-side up, then braces the bottom against his thigh as he opens it one-handed. He’s looking at Lydia the entire time; so is Laura.

“Peter let us know you handled the kill yourself,” Chris says after a moment, holding the bottle cap a little above the bottle.

“And then you shipped your dress back for cleaning, and I took it over to them,” Laura adds. She lets go of Chris so she can twist further around to face Lydia. “To point out all the stains, like you told me too.”

“We barely knew him,” Lydia says icily. “He was a year ahead, and left town before Allison came. I suppose it’s interesting that we all ended up in the same line of work. If you’re the type for that kind of trivia.”

Chris nods once, then tips his hand. He shakes out a pill for Laura first, then one for himself. He would swallow dry if left alone, but Lydia sighs and walks back to the bed and holds out her wineglass.

When they’re asleep, curling around each other, Laura’s head on Chris’ shoulder and Chris’ hand twining in her hair, Lydia puts the pill bottle next to her mostly untouched wineglass on the bedside table. Then picks up her laptop, and goes back to trying to ensure that Stiles has clear exits.

* * *

_“Because it got all over a piece of plastic the size of a bus, Lydia, how wasn’t I going to notice? For once I’m glad Derek still shops like a refugee and defaults to the supersize package because we needed the coverage.”_

Stiles calls Lydia about two hours later, without any advance notice, and returns her greeting with his protests. “I’m fine,” Lydia says.

_“I was supposed to shoot him,”_ Stiles says. _“That’s what we talked about. That’s what we scoped out. That’s what I fucking calculated the fucking blood splatter pattern for, and while I am eternally grateful for your precision with a sledgehammer…it was a fucking sledgehammer, Lydia.”_

“Peter and Derek passed on everything and now Laura seems to have revived that damned sentimental streak of Chris’. And you know how long it took to deal with that,” Lydia says.

_“They did that because I wanted them to, and you know he’s still sentimental as hell, he just got a lot less moralistic about it,”_ Stiles snaps back. He’s moving around, probably using one of the headsets.

Lydia checks the schedule. “Well, you knew him better than I did.”

_“Not really, first-teamers didn’t talk to us benchwarmers. And if I remember right—”_ he’s very frustrated with her, if he’s pretending his memory is fallible _“—he would’ve gone to at least a couple of those team-bonding parties Jackson threw. You know. Since my invite always got lost in the mail. But that was when you were dating—”_

“What do you want?” Lydia sighs. She looks at the glass on the bedside table, but the wine would be warm now. Warm, and probably oxidized, and whatever else the humidity would’ve done to it. She should just get off the bed and pour herself a fresh one.

She stays where she is. Stiles is quiet too, just the occasional mutter or tongue-click as he rummages around in something. They’ve had enough to time to settle into their safehouse so he’s probably taking inventory, or, if he was especially restless, cleaning up after a detour.

He’s calling her. He killed somebody.

_“It was just making a point to the local cartel rep, who’s having delusions of independence,”_ Stiles says, dismissing that concern. _“Well, who was having delusions. He and us and the cartel are all cool now, and they’ll keep out of the way, and Derek even got some extra lessons in dismembering. Anyway. Sledgehammer.”_

“You were still busy having sex, so he’d see something before I killed him,” Lydia says. She waits for his inhale. “On purpose, Stiles. I know.”

He hangs up on her.

She looks at Chris. They might want to reach out to his Russian connections anyway, even if it’ll be a money-losing transaction, and…he won’t wake up for another three hours minimum. She knows that. She’s the one who fills that prescription. She never lets either of them do it.

Lydia closes her laptop and puts her phone on top of it. She rests her hand there too, then breathes in and puts both aside. Then she sinks back into the pillows and lets her head go back, and for a few minutes she closes her eyes.

* * *

She feels better the next day, when she comes down for breakfast and Chris has a tablet loaded up with potential itineraries for her upcoming swing through Eastern Europe. They need to do some portfolio-rebalancing as well as some favor-shifting, and it makes for almost a solid day of analytical work, which always clears her mind. Even back before she had the slightest idea about currency markets and gun-running, logistics were simple. Dealing with the funeral arrangements was how she handled all the deaths.

And then, she thinks, staring without seeing at the spreadsheet on her screen, she remembers. Again.

“We’re going out for dinner,” Laura says as Lydia gets up. The other woman’s childishly curled up in her chair, one shin braced against the edge of the dining table, intent on texting somebody. “Could bring you something back.”

“Just leave something in the fridge,” Lydia says. “I can help myself.”

Laura looks up. Yawns, then grimaces and reaches for her coffee. “Only woke up a half-hour ago,” she mutters, complaining to no one in particular. “I just—”

She stops herself before Chris looks a warning to her. He does so anyway, and then silently begins to clear Lydia’s place at the table. “I have chicken or I can boil some eggs,” he says quietly, and then he has to stifle his own yawn. “The chicken probably would go better with the salad.”

“Fine,” Lydia says. She turns the tablet over and leaves it on the table, and then looks at the two of them, still groggy from the drugs. They both treat that as just another nuisance, same as how Laura can’t help scratching at her bruises, or how Chris stocks up on antibiotic cream before Lydia or Stiles take him in for another tattoo. She should appreciate it.

She hates martyrs. Neither of them are, not even Chris, no matter how he tries to let them snap him in the right places for it, and if they were, she wouldn’t have let them live. _Stiles_ wouldn’t have. They’ve killed enough in their lives for the sake of martyrs, and at this point, knowing how much work it really takes, Lydia expects to get paid for what she does. Martyrs, obviously, can’t pay you: by definition they’re already dead.

“Go take a nap,” Lydia says sharply, watching them both start. She waits till Chris lifts his head and almost meets her eyes and then she pivots on her heel, walking out of the room.

* * *

_“I’m in the middle of something,”_ is how Stiles greets her, when she calls him.

Lydia’s gone through the trouble of a video call. Normally she prefers not to see whatever mess Stiles has made for himself, at least until he bothers to drag her into it, but perhaps that’s the nostalgia, too—in the very beginning, before they’d had more sophisticated ways of doing it, video calls had been their way to provide proof of life.

“I see,” she says.

Stiles sighs. Enough of his shoulders and collarbone are showing to make it clear he’s shirtless, at least, and behind him a blindfolded Peter is flat against the wall, arms extended over his head and clearly fastened to something beyond the frame of the screen, face contorted in a pained ecstasy as he writhes in place. Peter’s nipples are swollen, gone a flushed sienna against his piercings, and Lydia idly thinks that gold would’ve complemented his coloring more consistently.

_“Okay, look, just—give me a sec.”_ Then Stiles gets up—he’d been squatting, apparently—and moves around without bothering to angle his phone to give Lydia a clear view of what’s going on.

She glimpses a naked body lying along a tiled floor, milky blocks of muscle cutting across a riotously-colored design of flowers and vaguely-Aztec animals. A scatter of dildos, a pile of clothing where Stiles stoops to dig out a pair of latex gloves. Lydia hears him snap them on, hears a faltering plea from Peter, and then she ends up looking at a toilet as Peter shouts and limbs thump against tile and someone, likely Derek, lets out a choked snarl. The toilet is a lovely terracotta color, a better match for the tile than untanned flesh, although if Laura’s anything to go by, a few days under the Mexican sun will fix that for her brother and uncle.

Stiles grunts himself, then gets up with an unsteady sway that briefly shows Lydia his bare legs as he recrosses the bathroom. Then he walks out into a darkened hall, camera bobbing twice, and when he finally plops down in a chair against a stereotypical adobe wall, he’s wearing a pair of jeans that clearly don’t belong to him.

_“Derek’s ass isn’t going to be in shape for denim for at least a couple days, not that you ever seem to really want those details,”_ he tells her as he slouches.

“Yet you tell me anyway,” Lydia says dryly.

He shrugs. His lips look wet, like they’ve been glossed over with something, and then he raises his hand and casually rubs off the gloss with one finger. Sucks off his finger, smacks his lips together, the sound telling Lydia they’re still a little sticky. _“I feel like I still owe you for all the times you made me research shit to deal with Jackson’s bedroom insecurities.”_

Lydia presses her lips together.

Stiles used to let her get away with murder. Figuratively, at the time. When it became literal, he stopped the pandering. She supposes that that was to be expected, and anyway, on an intellectual level, she appreciates it. She’s not so egotistical as to think that, just because they’re now seasoned mercenaries, she’s too flawless to need somebody to call her on things. 

It’s still annoying.

_“I’m sorry about earlier,”_ Stiles abruptly says. When he speaks, his eyes flick sideways and his shoulders move restlessly, but those aren’t tells that he’s lying. He still hates putting her on the spot, even if he does it without hesitating. _“I know it didn’t fuck up the job, but it was a fuck-up anyway, and—it’s been a while since Derek and Peter hung out with Laura, I was thinking I’d let them have a family reunion after this.”_

Lydia folds her arm across her chest, then raises the phone higher so that Stiles can see that. “You’re not coming with me.”

_“I didn’t say I was going to, I just said—”_ Then Stiles cuts himself off, exhaling the rest of the breath instead of going on. _“Fuck. You know, Peter was researching this offer in the Middle East, this antiquities thing. I mean, really, like we’re going to Lara Croft our way through the fucking black market in khaki short-shorts and come out with a decent profit.”_

“We probably would, and you’d enjoy the catalog diving, and if you want to play dress-up, that’s fine with me, just stay out of my wardrobe,” Lydia says.

The corner of Stiles’ mouth twitches. Then he glances sideways again and his amusement fades. _“Derek asked whether I needed to track down any family, and—”_ one hand goes up to scruff at his hair _“—Jesus, Lyds, am I that fucking obvious? I mean, sure, even sociopaths have dark nights of the soul, but fucking Derek is asking me whether I feel like some revenging on some guy I can’t even remember which time he shoved me in the mud during practice—”_

“You remember,” Lydia says. She waits till Stiles stops glowering at her and settles for just petulant, and then she allows herself to dip her head and rub at the side of her forehead, where she can feel a headache brewing. “And yes, we are.”

He’s staring at her. She can sense it even without looking at the screen. Twice Stiles starts to say something and then takes it back, and then he finally resorts to a sheepish snort. _“Chris?”_

“No,” Lydia says curtly. She could blame Argent for getting on her nerves. Or Laura. Stiles wouldn’t care, even if he’d know she was merely shifting around the blame. But annoyingly, Lydia thinks, she still cares. If she’s lying to herself about this, then she’ll be lying to herself about something that will get them forcibly retired next. “You were supposed to shoot him.”

_“Yeah,”_ Stiles says. He’s silent again, but for only a second this time. _“And you were supposed to just monitor from the second floor bedroom, and we got thrown, didn’t we? Even if nobody actually fucked up?”_

“You’re being unusually charitable,” Lydia says.

Stiles raises his brows at her. And then he pushes himself up and hunches over the phone, suddenly in earnest. _“Lydia, for fuck’s sake, we walked out, we got paid, our alibi’s solid and we have no fucking revenging to do because at the end of the day, it was a job. Sure, it fucked with us, but we still did it and did it well, and that’s not the fucking problem. You know that. You know we’re not even remotely talking about that.”_

Lydia starts to correct him and ends up sighing into her hand instead. That headache is starting to unfurl and it’s not, in truth, a headache: it’s just a sense of strain that she thought she’d long since put behind her. A sense that really, she’s just going through the motions.

Nobody said she had to _enjoy_ the work. She just has to be excellent at it. And to stay excellent at it.

“I never even gave a damn about him. He wasn’t even important—two months after he left, Jackson couldn’t even remember his name,” Lydia mutters, massaging her temple. “And Scott, even he…did he even make friends with him?”

_“Look, Scott thought everybody in the damn world could’ve been his friend, if only this or that or the other thing hadn’t actually happened,”_ Stiles says, with a sharpness that she hasn’t heard from him to her in years. When she looks up, he’s rubbing under one eye, also betraying exhaustion. _“Not really. You know, if we looked up everybody who’d been in and out of town while we were living there…there’s other stuff we could be doing. Stuff that’s more fun.”_

She looks at him. “Do you want me in Mexico?”

Stiles blinks hard, then tilts his head. He gives it some thought. _“Not really. I mean, if it gets to that, I’ll just ship Derek and Peter—”_

“Chris will get them,” Lydia says. 

The idea of that amuses Stiles, and she can tell that he’d like to drift off into those musings, painting over with whatever kink’s caught his fancy lately. But he shakes himself out of it. _“Peter’s got unfinished business here, and Derek’s still tasting all the blood that got knocked out of him the last time he was down. That should be interesting enough. And if I’m messing up, I’m pretty sure you won’t have to actually be in town to tell me so.”_

“Unless I end up having to get you out,” Lydia says.

Stiles mimes taking a stab wound to the chest and slumps backward, grinning at her in that idiotically endearing way of his. She sighs again, and that’s when he says it: _“After I’m done and you’ve cleared out Europe, let’s go visit. We haven’t.”_

Lydia stills. He’s watching her, despite the lingering carelessness of his pose, slouched with one shoulder higher than the other, absently scratching at the side of his neck. People think she’s the more ruthless of them, but he’s the one who still has the genuine sympathetic impulses, without suffering the faintest signs of schizophrenia. 

“I’ll think about it,” she finally says.

_“Sure,”_ Stiles says, easy about it. _“Talk later?”_

“When I’m done with your damned job,” Lydia mutters, ending on the call on his smirk.

* * *

The next day, Lydia’s dress is sent over from the cleaner, along with a batch from her wardrobe storage company. She takes over one of the bedrooms and uses it to lay out all the clothes, planning her packing, and puts the freshly-cleaned dress on the bed. She’s still checking it over, examining all the seams for flecks of blood, when Laura knocks a boot-heel against the door frame.

It’s unintentional, the other woman slipping slightly as she just avoids stepping on a sash that’s trailed off a blouse hanging from the door knob. She catches herself against the frame and then hauls herself straight. “Hey.” 

“If you’re looking for something to do, you have plenty,” Lydia says, holding a blacklight up to the seam. “And if you’re looking for a distraction, you can find Chris. And if you’re looking to be an irritation, I am perfectly happy to lock you in the basement and I assure you, you will _not_ enjoy it.”

Laura doesn’t say anything, but she also doesn’t leave. She stands in the doorway and watches Lydia finish inspecting the dress. Then Lydia begins to wrap it in tissue-paper and a sheet floats away from her, and Laura leans forward to snag it out of the air.

“This whole thing where you think I’m going to get mixed up about it,” Laura says. She fingers the sheet for a second, then holds it out to Lydia. “I spent a couple years watching Derek and Peter get that wrong. I think I’m okay there.”

“If I had a dollar for everyone who’s told me they learned better from watching someone else,” Lydia mutters. She does take the sheet, and uses it for the dress. She’s not so ridiculous as to stand on her pride for pettiness like that, especially when it comes to doing the packing. Anyone who outsources that is someone who’s made shift from mercenary to client—or target, depending on which side of the transaction they find themselves on. “Morbid curiosity, I suppose I understand, but then, I also thought it was understood that that’s Stiles’ line. You and your brother and Peter talk enough, even if you haven’t gotten that from Chris.”

“I never said I learned it from Derek and Peter, I said I’d watched them fuck that up, the whole seeing somebody being vulnerable automatically meaning they’re going to roll over for you. I already knew that, I just got to learn how bad it can get, when you think falling in love is just about showing your belly to somebody else,” Laura says. Wary, but also far more amused, with a far bleaker tone to it, than Lydia was necessarily expecting. The woman’s a good, quick student, but she still is a student, being educated where Lydia had to teach herself. “For the record, I’m still not in love with you.”

Lydia lays the wrapped-up dress in her case, then steps back to examine the other outfits. Colors always seem to be the first thing memory gets wrong, and never the way you’d think—looking brighter in your head than they really are in real life. “I’m devastated.”

“Give me a break, you’re relieved. You _picked_ me, anyway. Chris kind of made himself look too good to walk away from, or so I hear, but you’d hate to get an actual pick wrong,” Laura says. Taking a step into the room. Hesitating when Lydia twists slightly her way, and then, instead of taking the clothes off the furniture, kicking over one of the shams Lydia set aside and plopping down on it instead, knees tomboy-bent up so she can rest her hands on them. “I feel like Stockholm Syndrome doesn’t really get it right either. I mean, I don’t know that I really feel _bad_ for you. Badass assassin running her own life plus the lives of whoever she feels is good enough at sex to keep around. Money and exotic countries and killing everybody who pisses you off, sooner or later.”

Pink’s supposedly fashionable now, but pink on a redhead is always dependent on what Lydia’s complexion has decided to do, and however expensive the airplane, air travel still is hard on the skin. “Is that Peter’s latest theory?” Lydia says.

Laura rocks sideways back on her ass, wincing slightly and then pinching at the inner seam of her jeans, tugging at the fabric. “What, that it’s some belated revenge thing? No, actually, he keeps complaining about Derek trying to simplify it down to that, even though Derek’s not really—you said you didn’t want to hear about that.”

“Did I?” Lydia asks.

She moves the pink dress back into the storage container and puts a green outfit in its place, contemplating the remembered give of its lines. It’s not supposed to be an active trip, but Stiles is in Mexico.

“Derek doesn’t really think it’s revenge either. He just thinks you wanted to kill the guy, so you did.” When Lydia glances over, Laura’s taken another of the shams and is building a little couch for herself against the doorway. She tosses her hair over one shoulder, keeping it from catching against the jamb, and then looks up at Lydia. “So that’s not right either, but I’m gonna guess it’s not _wrong_.”

“So you feel sorry for me,” Lydia says, and turns back to the dress.

“No, that’s not what _I_ said,” Laura says irritably, though she immediately follows it with a sharp inhale. When Lydia doesn’t do anything except pick up a pair of shoes and hold it against the dress, Laura’s feet scuff uncertainly against the floor. “Look, Stockholm Syndrome. I looked it up, a little. Before all of this, actually. When me and Derek had our one time off on our own, and I was thinking—God knows why, I was thinking maybe I should go back to college and finish a degree. Be a therapist.”

Lydia decides the shoes will work and turns them over to check that the cover on the heel still slides smoothly away from the razor blade stored under it. “Why a therapist.”

“Some weird idea that with the shit I’d already been through, I wouldn’t be thrown by anything else somebody could tell me. I mean, fucked my uncle, had my brother get so jealous about it he inadvertently got the whole family murdered, all that.” Laura’s tone is light enough that Lydia turns around, and finds the other woman looking away, head tipped so that her long brown hair makes a half-hearted veil. It shifts away as Lydia walks over to stand over Laura, and Laura sucks her breath again and warily looks up again. “Anyway, if I remember right, the way that works, it’s all about feeling sorry for the assholes doing things to you, to the point that you start thinking they’re right. Well, I’ve never thought that you’re doing the _right_ thing, here.”

Laura’s an idiot. Her whole family is, and all in the same way: plunging headlong into gambles that no one with a shred of sanity would even stop to assess, let alone take. Derek’s blunter about it, Peter’s more charming about it, but in the end they’re all the same.

Lydia folds her arms across her chest, and rolls her weight onto the balls of her feet, looming over the other woman. The pupils of Laura’s eyes bloom darkly, like those of a frightened or stunned animal—or like those of an addict. “I told you when we first met that this wasn’t a rescue.”

“And believe me, I’ve never forgotten that for a second.” Laura’s voice is thicker, lower. She shifts on the cushion and her knees sway open; she’s unladylike in her arousal, too, and sometimes Lydia thinks that that’s why she complements Chris so well, with his sleek care. “And Chris, you didn’t even have to tell him, since he came looking. So just because we’re poking now—”

“I don’t tolerate you to satisfy your curiosity either,” Lydia says, turning abruptly. The clothes nearest them flutter in her wake and brush a chilly draft over her front.

“Well, I’m human, I can’t help wondering, even when it’s bad for me.” Like a sulky child, Laura sounds, and then she sighs heavily and sends the sham skittering across the floor. When Lydia glances down at it, the other woman crawls on her hands and knees up alongside Lydia, till the tips of her hair are tickling the tops of Lydia’s feet. “We’re poking because _you’re_ not right. You’re off and it’s just—be as disgusted as you want that we’re pathetic or whatever, but you are.”

Lydia continues to look at her, as she starts rocking her weight from side to side. Lifts a hand like she’s going to toy with her hair, then lowers it, flushing, her chin wavering but not dropping. Stiles rambles about that sometimes, the way Derek and Peter just keep on looking, the way they’re going to get shot in the face even if they look so _pretty_ like that, frightened and aroused and helpless about both.

“I wasn’t right to begin with, according to you,” Lydia finally says.

“Yeah, well, right and wrong don’t have anything to do with the fact that I want this. I know what this all—” Laura waves her hand blindly at a chair stacked with accessories “—all of this, I know what it is, I know how fucked-up it is and how fucked-up it’s made me and still making me, and I’m fine with that. That is, I _was_ fine with it, but now you’re off.”

“And you want it back the way it was. I see. It’s about safety,” Lydia says. “Consistency. Fear of change.”

A flash of irritation goes through Laura’s eyes and she starts to rise. Then something else goes across her face, something no less heated but more…studied, and she settles back. Turns over to sit where she is, puts her hands down behind her, and leans on them, gazing up at Lydia. “Bad habits, yeah. Sums up pretty much my whole life.”

Lydia unfolds one arm and lets her hand come down. Laura’s not so sure of herself that she doesn’t flinch from it, but Lydia simply holds it out, fingers slightly curled, and the usual shiver goes through Laura as she moves forward, tilts her head, lets Lydia grip her chin. Her lips part in a soundless gasp as Lydia runs one thumb back along her cheek till the edge of the nail digs in near the hairline. Her pupils are still wide.

“It’s nothing to do with you,” Lydia tells the other woman. Faintly surprised at herself, but then, she’s not immune to bad habits either, and she’s never liked it when others have taken undeserved credit. “It has very little to do with the target either.”

For a second Laura thinks about asking for more information. But she does know something of Lydia, at this point, and Lydia allowed that to happen. It’s silly to think that they can live together the way they do and still remain complete mysteries to each other. Which wasn’t the point of taking Laura along, anyway.

“It going to last a lot longer?” Laura finally settles on.

“Probably not,” Lydia says after a moment.

“Okay, well,” Laura says, and then stops herself. She leans into Lydia’s hand. Testing the grip, and then her eyes close and her tongue laps out over her bottom lip and teases at Lydia’s thumb till Lydia relents and presses it into the woman’s mouth.

Laura sucks at it fiercely, back on familiar ground and clearly relieved about it, and Lydia’s almost of a mind to make the woman rethink that. Except that would be bitter, and petty, and do nothing to deal with the parts of Laura’s personality that still irritate Lydia, and Lydia’s not an altruist by any means, but neither is she a mere sadist. And anyway, Lydia thinks, right now she prefers sex. She _wants_ sex. She wants Laura lying between her legs, under her, gasping for mercy.

She has that in her hands. Lydia cradles Laura’s head for a moment, stroking the hair out of her eyes, and then she shoves down.


	3. Chapter 3

Stiles doesn’t make a hash of Mexico. In fact, he finishes two days early and catches Lydia before she’s ready to leave for eastern Europe, taking a flight over and surprising Chris without enough food in the fridge to feed them all. Derek alone can put away enough to feed a whole household, if he’s been working hard enough.

“Or if I’ve been fucking them hard enough,” Stiles observes, eyes glued to how Derek’s spraddled his legs, sunk back on the couch and scowling while Peter presents a bemused Laura with some authentic Aztec weaponry.

Stiles travels more than Lydia, and Peter’s taken to making little presents like that whenever the Hales all meet up again. It’s not their love triangle flaring up again—Derek’s annoyance has far more to do with the fact that he keeps yawning, but Peter wants to stay and talk—so much as some odd familial impulse rearing its head, Lydia thinks. Perhaps a touch of competition with Chris, who hardly cares and who isn’t even present, having run out to remedy the food situation.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Lydia says, turning back to Stiles.

He’s restless, jiggling his leg, twitching his shoulders and his hands, and none of it has anything to do with making himself look harmless, or look dangerously deranged. It’s all genuine, from his bloodshot eyes to the jagged chuckle he gives her. “Maybe I should’ve fucked them harder,” he mutters, rubbing at the side of his face. He turns away as Derek looks over. “I don’t know. They needed to be able to keep up. The job got a little weird and I wasn’t interested and I just wanted to get it done.”

“Go up,” Lydia says after a moment. She stares at him till he’s run out of faces to make at her, and then puts her hand out to take his arm as he moves past her. “No, with Chris, when he’s back.”

Stiles looks irritated with her, while across the room Peter falters in his spiel, only to gather himself up as if he’s honestly contemplating something with Lydia. Really.

“He’s quiet, you know that, and I won’t be up for a while yet,” Lydia tells Stiles. “Laura can come by later for him.”

“So we’re not talking complete sets so much as interchangeability now?” Stiles snorts.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Lydia says, taking out her phone. She texts Chris to let him know, while Stiles watches her and continues to make aggravated noises, and then she looks over at Stiles again. “Or ignorant. Or anything except coming down off whatever you’ve worked yourself into, so we can have an actual conversation.”

“Says the one who actually _has_ drugs around,” Stiles says, stalking off.

He is going in the direction of the bedrooms. He has to pass the Hales on the way but he doesn’t look over, though Lydia knows he notices how Peter makes the slightest movement after him, and how that in turn makes Derek and Laura tense up, both of them ready to intercept the man. It’s in the amused bounce of his step up the stairs, as he no doubt pictures exactly how murderous a gaze Peter then turns on Lydia.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not sleeping with me,” Lydia tells Peter. She walks over and holds out her hand, till Peter, with great precision, takes out his phone and deposits it in her hand. She only needs it for a moment before giving it back to him. “Don’t be late either, if you’re going to take offense at absurdities and expect that Stiles won’t toy with it later.”

“Lydia,” Laura starts, wavering between frustrated and pleading.

“You don’t have to sleep either. He doesn’t care whether you do or not, your brother and uncle should’ve told you,” Lydia says, and turns her back on all of them.

* * *

Lydia spends the night checking over Stiles’ trail from Mexico, and the next day, after breakfast, she heads over to an industry-only spa to catch up on her sleep.

She does sleep. There are no less than fifteen text threads between various combinations of the Hales devoted to wondering whether she requires any, and one very short thread dragging in Chris, who’d simply replied with specs for whatever shipment he’d been arranging for them at the time. She also sleeps where other people can see and walk in on her. She simply doesn’t do it around those who’d feel the need to remark on it.

“Rise and shine, o sleeping beauty,” Stiles says, from where he’s sprawled in the poolside chair next to her, when she turns over. 

He’s staring intently at his phone—building up a virtual chicken farm. Every few seconds, floods of white chickens storm across his screen from one building to the other, a one-way only torrent. Then some water drips off his hair—he’s been in the heated pool at least, he has its distinctive lavender-and-bergamot aroma coming off him—and onto the screen, and he accidentally removes one of the buildings when he uses the sleeve of his terrycloth robe to wipe it away. Stiles curses, then sighs and drops his head back and his phone off onto the little bamboo table between them, and looks over at her.

“Are we having second thoughts?” he says.

“Do you suddenly feel guilty about killing people?” Lydia asks. The attendant’s been in and left her a new pot of tea. She _pays_ for the privilege of not having to be paranoid, in more than mere money, and so when she lifts the pot’s lid, it’s not out of fear of poison, but out of fear that the tea’s brewed too long.

The swirl of leaves and flowers within still look fresh enough, so she replaces the lid and pours out a little to check the color and smell. Both seem fine, so she fills the rest of her cup and then looks up at Stiles, who’s just about gotten over his initial, always aggravatingly immature reaction.

“Oh, you’re joking,” he says, and snorts and kicks his feet out as he reaches over to start toying with the sugar bowl. “Nope. You?”

“If he put himself in a position where he merited somebody paying us to kill them, then I really don’t see why I’m the one who should have any regrets,” Lydia says. Then she takes the bowl away, before he breaks it.

She doesn’t take sugar or milk in her tea. Or honey, or any of the many other things people regularly dose tea with, as if they couldn’t just make up a drink with all of those other tastes to have. She drinks tea so she can taste tea.

Stiles drinks tea so he can play mad alchemist where their income isn’t depending on absorption times, and so he happily abandons the sugar for the three different alternative sweeteners provided by the spa, plus the locally-sourced organic cream—mercenaries aren’t any less susceptible to trends. “Yeah, no, I think we’re both agreed that was never the issue,” he says, because his fiddling’s also never been a barrier to his insight. “Also, I don’t really want to go back. I mean, I _don’t_ want to go back. So we could’ve gone a different way, if Gerard Argent had been one-tenth less of an asshole, or if law enforcement had been a little more on the ball. We could also be dead.”

“That’s a cop-out,” Lydia says. “You could say that about virtually anything.”

“Okay, listen, I know you’re off and you hate that and you’re taking it out on pretty much everybody but would you _just_,” Stiles snaps, hands suddenly still, eyes leveled like a razor blade against Lydia. 

He’s off. He’s angry, that’s how he shows it. Normally he never cares if she laughs at his jokes or not; he knows she understands them and for him the delight of a punchline is in thinking it up, not seeing the reaction.

She understands but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t return the stare, edge for edge, until he heaves his shoulders and sighs and she lowers her now-tepid cup of tea. Stiles glances at her, then swings himself around to stare up at the ceiling, folding his arms under his head. He crosses and uncrosses his ankles, then begins to fidget with his hair.

“I think it’s complete and utter bullshit that this guy bothers me more now, when he’s just another bounty routing through Switzerland, than when he was actively threatening to give me a permanent handicap,” Stiles finally says. He abandons his hair and brings his arms down to tug at his sleeves. “And it doesn’t help that you’re going off at the same time. We’re supposed to even each other out, Lyds, that’s how you stabilize a psychopath.”

“That’s not how you stabilize a psychopath, and anyway, that’s not what I do for you,” Lydia says. She pushes her teacup aside and reaches for the buzzer to call in waitstaff for a fresh pot. Then pulls her hand back and looks at it, soft and beautifully manicured against the expensive art-glass table. “I was thinking about it.”

“What to do for me?” Stiles asks half-heartedly. 

“No.” She taps her nails against the glass twice. “You know, we could still go back, if we wanted.”

Stiles loops one arm over his head, then peers over it at her. “But we don’t want to.”

“But the door is still open. Clearly, he had no idea. I wouldn’t buy a home and sign up for the local charity run, but we could drop into town for a few days and nothing would happen,” Lydia says.

“You aren’t the jogging type anyway,” Stiles laughs. He continues to watch her from behind his arm. “You’re saying it’s just the finality that’s bothering us? Except it shouldn’t bother us, because it’s not really final and if we wanted, we could walk off this job any time?”

“You sound like you think it’s a pipe dream,” Lydia says dryly.

He shrugs. “Nah, not a pipe dream. I mean, it wouldn’t be a cliché if a critical mass of burned-out assassins and what-have-you had called it quits, right? Sure, would take a lot of work and resources to make it stick, but—we have the resources. And we could do the work. If we wanted.”

Lydia opens her mouth, pauses. Not for long; anyone might take it as simply a need for breath. “A fresh challenge.”

“Yeah. Yeah. That. It’d be that.” The flatness of Stiles’ tone tells her he isn’t taken in a bit. “Well, listen, Lydia. I’m all for keeping ourselves fresh and all, but…I don’t _want to_.”

A second later he’s shoved himself up to perch on the edge of his couch, head thrust aggressively forward, one knee jiggling into the arm resting atop it. She can’t help but laugh, and after the first annoyed second, he understands why and merely cocks his head.

“Then why are you off?” she asks.

“I don’t know yet,” Stiles says. He pauses himself, then nods decisively. “But it’s definitely not that. I’m not bored with this yet, I’m not scared of it, I’m not sick of it. You know, that fuckhead didn’t put me off lacrosse then, and he’s sure as hell not going to put me off my life now.”

She does breathe out then. Stiles catches her and pushes himself up further, watching, his fingers twitching, and he _was_ worried what she’d think and a small part of her had been wondering about him, and for all the years between them—not all the years they’ve lived, but all the years they’ve taken from others, that’s a truer count—they still are afraid for each other, deep down. It’s the only fear they still let themselves have, losing the one person who they can still be sure gives a damn, for the same reason. 

“Well,” Lydia says, and breathes again, more slowly. She takes her time twisting back, putting her shoulders flat against her chair. She looks at the far wall. “So it’s not that.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.” Stiles gets up and starts to amble around the room, poking and prodding at the decorative knick-knacks lining the shelves, and it’s only then that Lydia realizes how strangely suppressed he’d been before. His old lightning-wire restlessness is returning. “No. It’s not what I meant when I said we should visit either. I—fuck, I don’t know what I was thinking, I guess I…I don’t know. I still…I kind of think we should. Pop into town, just to be sure to put it to bed.”

And if his jumpy energy is back, then so is her exasperation. “Put _what_ to bed? Our nonexistent nostalgia for the childhood we re-murdered a few weeks ago?”

“I love your way with words, do I tell you that enough?” Stiles laughs playfully.

Lydia doesn’t answer him. He chuckles again anyway, then tosses himself back into his chair, his feet kicking up higher than they need to. She tugs at her robe where it’s twisted too snugly against her, then looks over. “So it’s not regret.”

“Yeah, no, I guess this is the assassin version of a midlife crisis, or something. I still don’t…I don’t really know, honestly,” Stiles says. “Was hoping you did. I mean, you usually—”

“That is so old,” Lydia says.

“But so true,” he insists. He flops over to face her, suddenly serious. “So. Going back.”

“If you’re going to be so irritating about it, I suppose,” she says.

Stiles starts to answer, irritated, and then stops himself. He sits up again and twists to put his feet down on the floor. She can feel his stare roving over her, nosing into every potential chink and cranny, looking for traces. Then he gets up, blowing his breath out with obnoxious volume, and pads over to her side and drops himself down next to her.

“Do you have a problem with going back?” he says.

She starts to look at him and then twists back, but she knows she’s already given him far too much to work with. She should’ve known that from the way he’d asked that—the phrasing, the arch in his voice, the shiver of the chair as he jiggled his leg. She _did_ know, but that’s why Stiles is still her friend: it’s one thing to be able to read another person that well, another to read them and yet not be able to stop yourself.

“No,” Lydia says under her breath. She puts her hand out towards the cold tea, then pulls it back and turns sharply to look Stiles full in the face, without any more ridiculous equivocation. “No, I don’t. I don’t think it’ll _fix_ things either, but…I don’t have a problem. With visiting.”

“Okay.” Stiles looks at her, still and calm, without the eerie threat he brings to his calmness when he’s trying. His head tilts slightly, and then he blows his breath out again, brings his arm up to rub at the back of his head. “Well. Okay, then. Down-home week, here we—”

“I think we should bring them,” Lydia says, and watches Stiles twitch, grimace as he scratches himself, and then lower his arm. “Not _there_, you fool. But we’ll be there a good week and if you think it makes _any_ sense whatsoever to leave them in Chris’ renovated tomb of a family chateau…”

Stiles makes a face at her, then flaps one hand in her direction as he hops off her chair. “Oh, come on, give me some credit. I might’ve accidentally killed the class fish because I trusted the Internet over the teacher’s care instructions, but that was a long time ago. I’ve got a _much_ better survival rate now.”

Lydia raises her brows. “Sample size of two and a half.”

“Two, really,” Stiles says, and then he gives her one of his boyish, hapless grins. “You were a lot quicker on the uptake with Chris than me. We all know that.”

Well, she isn’t going to turn down a compliment when she sees no need to. So she smiles back at him. They both know she isn’t distracted. “You’re not going to argue.”

“I…” Stiles pauses and it’s not a hesitation, not enough uncertainty in it “…yeah, well, no. Nope. Wasn’t planning on it. I mean…fuck, Lyds, the last time you sent over a budget, I saw the extra caches for them and I didn’t say anything.”

“What would you have said?” Lydia asks.

He does hesitate then, and the sheepish look he gives her right after is not only sincere, it’s well-earned. “That I kind of don’t think retirement funds are necessary, given Derek’s self-destructive leanings, but hey, if you want to mess around with compound interest, don’t let me stop you?”

“I’ll tell them,” Lydia says after a moment.

Stiles doesn’t look grateful. He doesn’t look ungrateful either, for that matter—merely interested, with a touch of relief that she’s not going to press now. He’s never been ashamed about having a weakness or two, only about making her cover them more often than he manages to remember to do it himself.

“Sure, thanks. Peter’s been dancing around getting to know you better anyway, I think he figures that’s the next level up, now that he’s gotten the hang of triple-bidding,” he says, easily enough. He’s wandering back over to his side, looking speculatively at his phone. “Well, good, that’s settled. I already booked the alibi anyway.”

Lydia stares at him.

“Yeah, yeah, I figured I’d better earn it,” Stiles says, grinning at her again. “You know it, Lyds. Whatever the fuck it was, it didn’t throw either of us _that_ much. We’re still us.”

“You say that as if it has no consequences whatsoever,” she finally says, getting up. “As usual.”

* * *

When Lydia informs Chris, it’s in the context of making travel arrangements, which, obviously, Stiles did not get around to booking along with the alibi, and not just because he was planning on Chris doing it anyway. He’s always done that, left her a loose end to tie up. The first few paired science projects, it would drive her insane.

“Doesn’t seem like it’s just intentional,” Laura observes, leaning over Chris’ shoulder to look at the computer screen. 

His shirt ruffles up where she’s slipped her hand inside it and he takes a low, slow breath, but his fingers continue tapping steadily at the keyboard. He hasn’t commented. He’s not going to. Long before they ever got to him, Chris was taught that sometimes people needed to work things out a certain way, and the best that the rest of the world could do was to just take cover. He’ll be satisfied with simply knowing that he’s the one entrusted with securing said cover.

“I mean,” Laura says, giving Lydia an uncertain look, as if having second thoughts is going to buy her any grace. “He doesn’t do it just to piss you off. He does it for a reason, and with you two there’s always one.”

“Is that what you think?” Lydia says from the doorway.

Laura leans up and her hand slides out of Chris’ shirt-collar to come to rest on his shoulder. His head tics slightly towards her, then straightens out as another flight grid loads onto the screen. He’s satisfied.

She isn’t, but she’s also not so cocksure that she’ll assume dissatisfaction and curiosity are to be tolerated. “I’m thinking you mentioned he didn’t book it for a reason,” she says, eyeing Lydia.

“You think?” Lydia echoes.

“Yeah, well…look, either you’re mad at me and gonna take it out of me later, or you aren’t,” Laura says, her wariness suddenly melting back into a brash attitude that strongly recalls her brother. “I don’t know, we’re watching for your little twitches twenty-four seven, am I supposed to _not_ try to pick up things?”

She’s irritating like that, and yet, there’s a reason why Lydia didn’t just kill the woman right away, when Lydia hasn’t batted an eye at killing other people who were trying far harder to please her. “I’m taking Derek and Peter out to lunch,” Lydia says after a moment.

Laura’s brows lift slightly, while on Chris’ shoulder, her fingers curl nervously inward; Chris ignores her. “Yeah. Peter only texted me half a zillion times.”

“I debated about ordering something in for you,” Lydia adds.

Then Laura relaxes, snorting and stroking the hair back from her face. She puts both hands up to do that; when she lifts the one from Chris’ shoulder, she twists her wrist so that her fingers glide off the leather band encircling Chris’ neck. Then she looks far too pleased at the nod that earns from Lydia.

“And then decided not to, because unlike my bro and uncle, I don’t need to be sweet-talked into being looked after,” Laura says. She twists her hair into a thick tail and pulls it over one shoulder, then drops into the chair beside Chris, legs coltishly awry. She grins up at Lydia, still as wary as she is bold, and pulls her hair around one wrist to lock it up by her jaw. “Look, don’t get me wrong, I know I’m never going to be you. That’s not my goal in life anyway. I’m just saying, I was dealing with Derek and his issues way before they walked him into the arms of Chris’ sister.”

“That was when you were fucking Peter?” Lydia says.

Laura stills. Doesn’t quite stiffen, although it’s close enough to raw for Lydia to feel the heat in the woman’s look. But she gets over it within one breath, and even looks a little infatuated with how close the cut was. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, so I was dealing with a couple people’s issues. Sometimes you kind of hope, if you’re doing that, then your issues will just get themselves in line while you’re off doing that. I don’t know if that’s smart or not…”

She lets her smile last a little too long, so that it turns from wavering to rictus, and then awkwardly twists off her lips when she rubs at her face. The hair loops off of her wrist and she reaches back up with both hands to shove it back behind her ears, looking up at Lydia when Lydia’s already nearly through the doorway.

“I’ll order some blinis and caviar when I’ve got this locked,” Chris says. 

Lydia has her back to him by then, but she can tell from the pitch and volume of his voice that he’s speaking to Laura, not to her. She hears Laura’s almost-curse and then rueful chuckle, and keeps walking.

* * *

Since she’s not a fool, Lydia doesn’t take Derek and Peter anywhere that requires significant mental engagement to understand the food. Which is more about Peter than it is about Derek, who is naturally inclined to sit back and let someone else assert themselves. Peter is far too easily lured into debates and while that can be a useful lever, on this occasion Lydia prefers directness.

“We’re visiting a memorial,” she says over their steaks.

Sixty-day-aged cuts taken from premium heritage breeds, each individual steer personally selected, since simple hardly needs to mean cheap, and for all that, she might as well have picked a fast-food joint. Peter’s toying with his utensils, eyeing her, while Derek bolts his steak with the unenthusiastic efficiency of a trash compactor.

“That explains the lack of a graveyard anywhere within twenty miles of the hotel,” Peter finally says.

“We weren’t professionals when they had to be buried, so we didn’t have the legal right to do anything about where the bodies ended up. And when we had the resources that that didn’t matter, it stopped making sense to relocate them,” Lydia says. She looks Peter in the eye as she shaves a strip of cartilage off her steak. “If we’d done that, we might as well have put up a giant sign to the authorities that this was still a sore point. They’d already gone and put something up, so clearly, they cared.”

“And you don’t?” Derek says, finally looking up. He’s mumbling, and when she pointedly flicks a finger towards his glass, he thinks about rolling his eyes at her. Thinks about it, and then slouches instead as he picks up his beer and obligingly washes out his mouth, ignoring Peter’s muttered reprimand. “Look, you’d only finally gotten around to Kate right when we—”

Lydia lets her knife scrape against her plate, cutting off a piece of her steak, and Derek shuts up. “That was clean-up. For that matter, _Chris_ was clean-up. Neither of them were the main event.”

Derek presses his lips together, and almost holds himself still enough to absorb the impact when Peter kicks his leg or jabs him, whatever that happens under the table. “Okay,” he says, over the breath Peter is drawing. “So this is clean-up too?”

“More or less. You don’t kill a high-school classmate every day,” Lydia says.

He lets out a sharp, short laugh, and then looks surprised when Peter starts. Derek is a blunt instrument by preference, Lydia thinks: he could hone himself but he’d never feel comfortable enough with that sort of edge to really make full use of it, so better to stay a hammer and not be afraid to slam yourself. That sort of attitude is common enough with mercenaries. “So we’re talking about it now?” he says.

“Stiles would talk about it,” Lydia says. She waits till Peter’s started to open his mouth. “If you asked properly.”

Peter hesitates, lips still shaped around a word. Then he glances down at his plate. He finally deigns to taste his pommes aligot, although he defeats the entire point of that dish by using his knife to cut short the stretchy tail before lifting the forkful. “Of course he would,” he says, glancing back at Lydia. “He’d talk about it, and educate us all about the right and wrong way to turn into a drug kingpin, and throw in an explanation about the evolution of meth lab cookery as a grace note. And yet I still doubt he’d truly really address the issue…”

“We’re talking about that, right? What’s wrong with him?” Derek says, rejoining the conversation.

“What’s wrong with him?” Lydia echoes.

Derek grimaces. “That’s not what I—look, you know how I meant it. And you’re not buying us a meal just because you want to dance around this either.”

“I’m not buying you a meal because I think you’re going to fix it either, and that isn’t the insult to your pride that you’re going to take it as,” Lydia says dryly, taking a sip of her wine.

“Well, it’s hardly buying us anything when we all go into the same box at the end. Fine food, fine wine, fine hobbies…” Peter tilts his head, his lips offering a smile his eyes don’t second. “Which displeases you to no end, we’re aware.”

Lydia snorts before she can help herself. Then, upon considering their expressions, she relaxes into it, and gives them a dismissive jerk of her wineglass before setting that down. “Oh, don’t think so highly of yourselves. Yes, Stiles has a thing for you. Yes, he can be irritating about it. No, that doesn’t mean I _resent_ you. I know how he is, and if I had a real issue with him, we would’ve parted ways long before this.”

“Well, fine, then why are we doing this?” Derek asks. He slumps back in his seat, pushing away his plate, and then reaches up to tug at his shirt, pulling the collar away from a set of fading bruises crossing down over his chest. “Why are you sitting us down and warning us we’re going to visit some memorial for—”

“It’s not a warning. It’s an explanation.” Lydia puts one hand on the table and listens to the click of her nails. They’ve gone that quiet, both of them, the moment she opened her mouth. Pushy but not dumb, and not entirely lacking in self-preservation instincts. “What happened was upsetting. Stiles and I are still working through it. Part of that is our trip, and we will be bringing you along, and you will not make any kind of idiotic fuss over it. You can have all the texting wars you like with Laura and Chris, but you’ll keep that away from anything that kills anybody. We’re not there for work.”

Derek is the first to tire of the stillness, abruptly rolling his shoulders as his chin hikes up. “So that’s not a warning?”

“It’s not a warning if she expects that we never were planning on it anyway,” Peter says, his eyes suddenly cool and sharp. He dips his head, as if ceding ground, and then presses on anyway. “Very well, we’ll do our best to not…fuss. Or do anything not in the plan, if you’d like to advise us further on what that would be?”

“I assume Chris has forwarded you the itinerary,” Lydia says dryly.

“Of course,” Peter says.

They consider each other. It’s very presumptuous, Lydia thinks idly, that he thinks he’s adapted so well as to be in that position. Peter does not think he’s untouchable, she is sure of that—not with the way he still manages Derek so closely, worried that every misstep might get the man killed or worse, dropped behind. He doesn’t trust his persuasiveness to get both of them out of every situation. But he does think these days that he has a look at the table, if not a full seat at it. He thinks he knows how the places are set.

Then again, he might not be wrong about that. She is here, watching them waste expensive meat, talking to them about Stiles’ _feelings_, for God’s sake. Years and years of hard work and sacrifice, and here she is, still the one of them who deals with the emotional attachments. Sometimes, honestly, she wonders why she hasn’t shot _Stiles_.

“So okay, we’ll wait around till you get over it,” Derek says, pushing back from the table. He doesn’t go far, just a few inches before Peter, lips tightly pressed together, clamps a hand on his shoulder, and then he snorts and gives his shoulders a muscular, liquid roll against the suitjacket strapping them in, clearly always intending to just sprawl. “That’s it, right? I mean, were we supposed to be going anywhere, or something?”

“My nephew—” Peter starts, half-irritated, half-terrified.

“More or less,” Lydia says. She smiles at Peter, then gently sets her knife and fork down and presses the button under the table for the waitstaff. She’s had, and done, enough.


	4. Chapter 4

The day that they’re supposed to visit the memorial to their dead families and friends, Mexico catches up with them.

She’d _known_ it was too good to be true, Stiles showing up early and with just electronic clean-up to handle. It’s why, she thinks later, as she’s scrubbing red wine into the skirt of her dress over the bloodstains, she’d woken up so restless that morning. Why she’d broken her own itinerary, which she never does, and instead of going to the memorial, had gone down to the local public library.

The library has a sightline to the memorial from its glassed-in back. She’d spent a fair amount of time there, in the early days, taking a break from the free wifi hotspot around the corner and not touching her coffee as she and Stiles had debated which way to go: legal, safe, illegal, unsafe. They’ve added a bookcase that cuts down on the view, but not so much that she doesn’t spot the extra loiterers.

She calls Stiles. He sends the Hales on a decoy run and then gets tangled up in a fight so Lydia stalks the last one into a restaurant kitchen and deals with them. 

“Clean-up’s coming,” Stiles says when he finds her, slinging himself around the door. His fingernails are clean but she can still see the blood in his eyes. If they run into the police, he’ll get himself arrested before either of them can cite anything about probable cause. “Chris is asking if we want a flight out.”

Lydia lifts her hands and watches the wine run off her fingers. Too dark, she thinks, and then a drop hits her skirt and ruins the carefully accidental tail she’d created. She jerks her hands back, only remembering at the last minute to swing wide as well, and then bites back her hiss of breath.

Stiles lets it out for her. When she turns around, his eyes are wide and the blood is out of them. 

He stares at her. Sucks in his breath, pauses, and then ditches what he’d been about to say in favor of looking around. He finds where the wine’s splashed and wipes up as she finishes with her dress and checks the metal for fingerprints. She holds the bag for him to trash the wipes, and they meet up eleven minutes later in the parking lot. The cleaners are heading in as they pull out.

* * *

Stiles drives. It’s not their rental, but a midsize that has a thin, dulling coat of dried dust on it, as if someone’s repeatedly parked it outdoors without rain. The backseat has bright orange dust ground into the creases and when Lydia reaches down to take her heels off, she spots a faded receipt for a local grocery store chain stuck under the car mat. Two weeks old, family-size cereal boxes but less than a pound of cold cuts.

“Waiter’s still learning to outgrow the frat food, I’m guessing,” Stiles says. He rubs the heel of his hand across the side of his head, then looks over. “You need me to pull over? There are trees.”

“No,” Lydia says, and continues to twist herself out of her stained dress.

They hand that and a bag of other waste off to another set of cleaners when they change cars, twenty miles down the road. She pulls on a set of jeans from a warehouse brand and deliberately leaves stragglers hanging out of her ponytail. Stiles is already dressed appropriately, but he takes a few minutes to steep in the smoke from a joint—these days he doesn’t even touch alcohol unless it’s a business meeting, preferring his ‘psychopathy straight’—and then he stops and looks at her. He takes a breath and she tenses. But he only reaches out and floats his hand over the side of her face. He waits till she nods, and then carefully smudges her eyeliner with his thumb. When they stop for the night, she’ll pick up something cheaper-looking at a drugstore, but that will do for now.

They get going again. At the next stop, Lydia gets on their burner equipment and starts going back over their trail, searching for what was missed. It only takes her three minutes before she comes across Chris’ trail, doing the same thing. She backtracks as if stung, and only after she’d slammed down the laptop lid does she realize he can’t see her.

Stiles can, but he just frowns at her. Doesn’t ask, either, when she takes over the driving and lets him have the computer. 

“I could tell him to stop,” he says.

“You could tell him our latitude and longitude,” she points out.

He grimaces. “Yeah,” he says, and leaves it.

They stop for the night, get six hours of sleep, and are due to be on a plane to Los Angeles the next day. They don’t go to Mexico; Laura’s going to Mexico. By herself—Lydia spends five seconds longer looking at the booking on the computer than she should.

“Are you cancelling?” Stiles asks her.

She leans back in the chair and starts to look at him, but he raises his hands and backs away. 

“Not her, okay?” he says, his tone rising sharply. It’s not in question. “I meant us. If they’ve figured out Derek and Peter should actually be going to—”

Lydia takes a breath. She hates this feeling, she suddenly thinks. This rushed, tight feeling, as if she doesn’t quite have the time to see all of the edges of the picture and just has to guess. Even if the edges aren’t likely to affect the shape and the shape is what she needs to plan, and being meticulous means you’ve learned to ignore the irrelevant and avoid paralysis by detail—she has that feeling. She hasn’t in a long time.

“Okay,” Stiles says suddenly, and he sits down on the bed and just looks at her. His hands twist around each other in his lap, and then he heaves out a sigh and screws his eyes up and flops over backward. “Jesus, okay. Fucking _Mexico_. I fucking—”

He doesn’t finish. She turns back to the computer, and after another second, she closes the window with Laura’s booking and opens the one with their own. She hesitates another moment before cancelling it. And then she sits there, and Stiles lies there, and they think.

“Do you want to know?” Lydia finally asks him.

“No.” Stiles jiggles his leg. “Yeah. But not—goddamn it.”

He heaves himself up, then rubs his fingers against his eyes. Then, slowly, he drags his head up to face her.

“They figured it out,” she tells him. “We don’t have to do it.”

He nods. The corners of his mouth are twitching; in another mood, he might be grinning. Another person might think he’d fighting to hold back his pride, but she knows him better, and she knows it’s more complicated. It’s the same reason why she feels rushed now, even though Laura’s flight to Mexico means she has no immediate cause to leave this room.

She could sit here, and open up the browser again, and they could watch the others deal with the fallout. There is a not-insignificant chance that it won’t be done properly, without Stiles or Lydia to manage: Laura wants to save herself above anyone else, deep down; Peter still thinks he’ll cover all the angles on his own; Chris wants to die for someone; Derek just wants the comfort of being wanted. There is also a not-insignificant chance that it will, and they’ll do everything the way that they’ve been taught. And then…

“Is this when we’re supposed to shed a tear, and talk about our babies growing up?” Stiles finally says, lips twisting. He grips the bed to either side of him and starts to knead the mattress as if it has a neck to break. “Did I ever say I wanted to be a parent?”

“Did you ever say you wanted responsibility for someone else, period?” Lydia snaps back. She’s tired, she is finally starting to recognize. She is used to this life but right now she can feel it at the edges, where they’re starting to catch and curl up into ash. “We kill people, Stiles. We’re responsible.”

“Yeah, okay, but—” Then he jerks his head to the side. He’s looking at the door, and thinking about storming out, but in the end, he turns back to her. “Okay. So…you know what? I could eat. You?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Lydia says wearily.

“I’m not.” He hesitates, rocking on his hands, and then he swings himself up onto his feet. He takes a step towards her, then inhales and sits back down. “I’m not, Lydia,” he says, more softly. “Yeah. We’re responsible. We did this. But…what, are we going to meet them? We doing that? Are we flying back to France?”

“What makes you think they’re going to meet us in France?” Lydia sighs.

Stiles just looks at her. She doesn’t want to meet his gaze, but does, and then she sits back in her chair. A lock of hair sways across her face and she brushes it out of the way, then lingers, feeling the residue that the hotel product has left on it. The hotel isn’t cheap, it’s midrange, but it’s still…not what she’s been used to.

Used to.

She’s used to this, she thinks, and she can feel her lips twisting the way Stiles’ had a moment ago. “What do you want to eat?” she finally says.

Stiles is surprised, for a second. She can still catch him at that; that’s not why they like each other. Then he gets up. He glances towards the door, then reaches back and holds his hand out to her. She takes it and pulls herself out of the chair—he just steadies her—and then lets him take the lead.

* * *

“I hate this,” Lydia says over dinner.

“You ate all of it,” Stiles points out, and then he snickers. “Oh, okay, well, we’re not in a hurry. We can check into a better hotel. And get your—”

“That facewash comes in hand-numbered bottles,” Lydia tells him.

Stiles presses his lips together, then sighs. “Okay, then.”

“I’ll find something else,” she says, a few minutes later.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” He pokes at the remains of his dessert. “We always do. That’s not the question. Right?”

She doesn’t bother answering that.

* * *

Another city. Instead of a hotel, they take a private rental. Not Airbnb, and not via any of their networks. Which is a risk, but Lydia’s had enough time to go through their back-up IDs and she feels confident these will hold up for a few weeks.

“Why a few weeks?” Stiles asks her, as he sets up a Netflix account and immediately starts on faking three different profiles. “We’ve got ones that’ll last for a year.”

“Because,” Lydia starts and then he grimaces and waves at her to not finish.

He lets the movies and shows play while they’re out of the house or in other rooms. It’s not necessary that they be there, only that the times make sense for someone to be there. And yet they end up sitting on the couch together, watching something. A historical drama. After the second episode, Stiles pauses and gets up and comes back with a bag of potato chips and a couple cans of spritzer that, after she’s glared at him, are not disgusting on the tongue.

“We used to do this,” he says after the fourth episode.

Lydia wipes chip salt off her fingers with a napkin. “We could do this whenever we want. You’re just never in town.”

“I did this when the last season of _Game of Thrones_ came out,” Stiles says. “I think it weirded out Peter, but Derek got it.”

“That makes sense,” Lydia says.

The end credits roll and Stiles turns to her. “Here’s the thing,” he says, suddenly, intensely earnest. “And before you tell me we already talked about this to death, I _know_ that, and I know this is just—so fucking bullshit karma. I just need to say that, Lydia, that we _did_ talk about it and make a decision but now we’re here and it’s just such—”

“Here’s the thing,” Lydia says deliberately.

Stiles sucks his breath back against his teeth, the sound whip-sharp. He stares at her, one hand dangling the remote, and then he slaps that down against the couch arm as he gets up. The TV goes into rewind and he sees that, stuttering his step away. Then he twists around. He’s furious with her, furious enough that she thinks, in that second, she’s mistaken him. They understand each other, and almost all of the time, that is the same as tolerating each other.

He can always leave her. That’s what people don’t understand. It’s not that they need each other; they aren’t some ridiculous Bonnie-and-Clyde impersonation, feeding off each other’s insecurities into a glorious disaster. That’s the whole _point_, that they aren’t and won’t ever be that. He can leave her, and she can let him go.

“You know your impression of me sucks,” he says abruptly. The tension running through him is something she can hear, a hum just on the edge of her teeth. And then he rolls his shoulders, drops one slightly, and suddenly, he’s staying. “Also, you don’t need to shock me to get me to listen anymore.”

“I know,” Lydia says. It takes her a moment, which he allows without comment. She catches herself smoothing her skirt, and then pushes herself to the edge of her cushion. Sets her mostly-empty can down on the end-table, and looks up at him. “Here’s the thing, Stiles. We did talk about it, and we did say we weren’t doing this. And I did agree with you.”

The quiet, domestic life, she means. The trust-fund drifter life too. Money is no object, but it stopped _being_ the object a long time ago.

“Yeah, well—” he pivots restlessly in place, rubbing a hand against his hair, over the top of his shoulder “—here’s the other thing, right? It’s not like we got complacent either. We were on. We caught them before they caught us. We’re still good, we’re still on top, and—”

“It wasn’t really about missing our old lives that bothered you about Matt,” Lydia says.

“Nope,” Stiles says. He jiggles one leg, then takes a backward step and flops onto the couch. Looks at her. “You?”

“I panicked,” Lydia says.

Stiles stares at her. She presses her lips together, then slowly leans back into the couch, turning slightly towards him. He starts to say something, stops, and then shakes his head. Doesn’t exactly smile. “You seriously don’t need to shock me these days, Lyds. Because _seriously_, I don’t need it.”

“I know. I know, but…” she shrugs “…you wanted to know. So I’m telling you. I knew he was from our town but I didn’t actually—I didn’t remember him. He was nothing back in high school, you know that. He didn’t mean anything till I actually saw him. And I know he shouldn’t have meant anything. It surprised me, too.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says after a long moment. He scuffs his foot against the carpet. “Well…yeah. So you know my philosophy about all of this, there’s no point in pretending it’s normal but also, let’s not make it something it’s not. We’re not saving the world or fighting the man or bullshit like that. We’re just…having a moment.”

“Well, Mexico means we had to anyway,” she agrees. 

They sit for a few more minutes, and then Stiles raises the remote and stops the movie. He hits fast-forward, lets it run for about ten seconds, and then stops the movie again. Then he makes a face and just goes back to the menu to choose something else.

“I think I need a little bit longer,” he says.

“Fine,” she says. She picks up her can again, feeling the way he’s looking at her, and finally nods. “So do I.”

* * *

“Would fucking help?” Stiles asks, when Lydia walks into the kitchen later that night, unable to sleep. He’s sitting at the table with a laptop in front of him. “Can’t do the drugs for you, but I can make up a pillow person.”

“Shut up,” Lydia says, and makes herself tea.

It’s whole-leaf bagged, but it’s still not what she’s used to. She finishes the cup anyway, and then goes back into the bedroom. She lies down on her side, pulling the blanket up to her front. She’s going to throw it over her shoulder, and then she rethinks that and just puts her head down.

A few minutes later, Stiles comes in. He wanders around to the end of the bed and then comes back up to her side, rolling into her back with surprisingly little bouncing. He doesn’t put his hands on her, and she doesn’t hand him the blanket. He’s still awake when she falls asleep.

They have sex in the morning, in the bathroom. It’s not planned, they’re just in the same room at the same time, underdressed, and she feels his breath graze her bare shoulder as he leans past her for the sink and when she puts her hands on his hips, he looks up and grins at her reflection in the mirror. No bells or toys or games, just his cock sliding between her legs and his fingers and her tongue in his mouth and the moisture blurring up the mirror behind them. And that means nothing, except that she wants it and he wants it. 

“You tired?” Stiles says, when they’re picking themselves up from the floor. He yawns, twisting his arm around to use his shoulder as cover, and then looks at her. “I’m tired. I know I just got up, but I want to go back to sleep already.”

“Then go back to sleep. We don’t have to be anywhere,” she says.

He nods and starts to go back into the bedroom, and then pauses. “You coming? Or…”

“Not yet,” she says after a long pause. Then turns the tap on, and starts to wash her hands. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” he says, and leaves.

* * *

“You checked,” Stiles tells her later that day. Empathic but not accusing, his gaze curious. “It was all packaged up when I looked. An _executive summary_, Lydia.”

“Are they back in Paris yet?” Lydia asks. Then, when his fidgeting gets too annoying, she puts down her book. “I didn’t check. I just set it up for when you were going to check, because of course you were and there’s no point in your burning up our VPN to search for the information.”

He laughs a little, embarrassed, and then flops down next to her, his head back on the top of the couch, his legs straight out. “Yeah, they’re fine. I think Chris is starting to get antsy—sending out feelers. You know he was going to figure it out first.”

“Did I?” Lydia says, picking her book back up.

Stiles is silent for several minutes. When she glances over, he has his hands folded across his belly and is staring at the ceiling. He crooks his fingers, then reshuffles their fold.

“I really want to kill somebody,” he confesses, and then turns wide eyes on Lydia.

“Are you expecting me to do something?” she says.

“Nope,” he says, getting up.

She keeps reading. When she hears the door shut, even though it’s only the bedroom door and she knows he’s just getting his gear together, she finds herself breathing more slowly than she needs to. She puts her book down and looks at her fingers splayed across its cover, and thinks…they are human. She never promised anyone she wouldn’t be afraid—least of all Stiles, who knows her better than anyone, who is the only person who has ever understood why she has the fears that she does. Why she doesn’t apologize for them.

That is where they’ve done better than their contemporaries, she thinks. They know what they are, and they don’t pretend otherwise. And this…time…this is just part of that.

Stiles leaves, and Lydia fills up the rest of the day without him.

* * *

“Back,” he says, late at night, forehead pressed against her bare shoulder. He’s clean, and still a little damp and cold from it. She thinks she should get up and make sure because it is _Stiles_, but the bed is warm, despite him, and she is a professional mercenary but she still wants to just lie here. “Not yet.”

She rubs her fingers along his earlobe, feels him shift against her. “Did you have fun?”

“Kind of. Well, yeah, okay, I did.” He raises his head and then startles for the barest second when she kisses him.

She knew he wasn’t leaving her, but still, she’s glad to find that she’s right.

“Not gonna check?” he says, after. Tracing fingertips across her back instead of pulling away and cleaning up, as usual.

She doesn’t like lying there, sticky and dirty, hair finding its way into her mouth when she moves, and even when she doesn’t. She doesn’t move. “Do you always have to make me?”

Stiles laughs, and draws his palm down her spine before he pushes himself up. He still doesn’t leave, curling his knees under his chin and looking down at her as she rolls over. He’s smiling at her. Half his hair flattened, with the spiked part leaning precariously over the border as if it’s straining to colonize the rest. They’re still very young, it strikes her.

“Did you ever think this was going to be it?” he says suddenly. Still smiling, body still loose, but it’s not an idle question in his eyes. “I mean, sure, we damn well were going to make it. But—did you think this would be it?”

“Are you _saying_ this is it?” Lydia says.

His brows pinch together. “That’s not what I me—”

Lydia grimaces and waves her hand at him. They’re still close enough that her fingers brush his hip; he glances down, then loops his arm over and takes up her hand. Not to kiss it, just to hold and look at her.

“You wanted to be like your dad,” Lydia points out.

“Yeah.” Stiles starts to scoot down the bed. He stops when he’s on his elbows and then just lowers himself the rest of the way, still holding her hand. His thumb rubs across her wrist before she traps it in her own hold, and then it quiets. “I think that would have worked out, too. You know. If.”

“I wanted to marry rich, get a divorce, and then be the next Laurene Powell Jobs,” Lydia muses. She stares at the ceiling. “You know, it’s not love.”

“That’s not what I was saying, do I look like one of them?” Stiles snaps, exasperated. And then he looks at her, and clues in, and huffs in relief. He slides down next to her, mussing her hair, but she doesn’t push him away. “Oh. Yeah. But it’s…”

“Us,” Lydia says. “This is us.”

* * *

Lydia is frowning at the TV when Stiles walks in, carrying a sack of groceries in one hand and a slightly soiled piece of paper in the other. “Hey, we’re starting to get fliers for the local elections,” he says. “I think we need to—Lyds? What, did something happen?”

“Does it look like something happened?” she asks.

He starts to answer her, and then goes quiet. After a second, he puts the bag on kitchen counter and then comes to stand behind her. They watch till the end of the segment, and then he reaches over and takes the remote from her hand, and turns off the TV.

“You know, I personally always find that stories about fashion icons from thirty years ago inspire and awe me,” Stiles says dryly. “They’re just so relevant to my current life.”

“Shut up,” Lydia says, getting up. “We’re done here.”

Stiles, being Stiles, doesn’t ask what did it for her. He just grins and sweeps one arm towards the door, and then, like the dramatic moron he still is, acts as if they’re going to stroll out then and there, groceries and clean-up be damned. Which they’re not.

But they are done.


	5. Chapter 5

“We were starting to think you weren’t coming back,” Laura mumbles.

They met up again in New York, not Paris. In this line of work, you can keep the mess out of the public eye, but the point isn’t to keep it completely invisible. Certain people need to know, because all you have is your reputation, and coming or going, it needs to be managed. So Stiles and Lydia took a small job before making the call to Chris.

He’s lying between Lydia’s legs, limbs inattentively slack in a way only sedatives ever accomplish with him. She gave them the pills at the same time, and usually he’s slower to succumb, but this time he went to sleep with shocking speed. Relief, Lydia thinks, as she draws her fingers through Laura’s hair, pulls it away from the woman’s slurring lips. “Did you?”

Laura’s hand drags at the blankets. “Mmmmaybe,” she says. “Just…didn’t seem…you, but it took so…”

“Because you don’t have the patience to think things through,” Lydia says. 

She reaches over and tugs the rumpled-up cloth out of Laura’s hand, and as she does, Laura lets out a long sigh. The movement of the blanket pulls her fingers straight, and once they’re flat, they don’t curl up again. 

When the other woman is fully asleep, Lydia gets out of bed. She pauses at the mirror on the back of the door to straighten her top and smooth back her hair, and then goes to the kitchen to make some tea.

Stiles finds her in a few minutes later. He moves as if he’s wandering, but his eyes are on her the moment he steps across the threshold. “Got any more for me?”

She hands him the cup she’s just poured out and gets herself a second one while he rustles up honey to add to his. “I assumed that e-stim wand was going to keep you occupied till at least the morning.”

“Well, as usual, you underestimate me,” Stiles snorts. He uses his finger to stir his tea, then sucks it clean as he turns towards her. Then grins at her expression, which has nothing to do with his ridiculous displays. “Or really, how worked-up Derek and Peter are after almost a month of plain vanilla rough sex. _They’re_ out till morning, for sure.”

“Did Chris not show them the supplies?” Lydia asks, brows raised.

“Peter doesn’t trust Derek with anything more complicated than flavored lube,” Stiles says. Shrugs. “Can’t blame him, honestly.”

Lydia has no interest in that discussion, so she simply drinks her tea. Stiles looks at her, head cocked, and then leans against the counter so that they’re facing each other. He moves his cup to his elbow and idly pokes his finger, the damp one, around the rim without actually touching the tea inside.

“So I guess the lesson is everybody needs a vacation once in a while?” he finally says. 

But his mouth’s twisting on him even as the words come out of it. Sometimes he knows how idiotic he is and doesn’t need Lydia to tell him. And sometimes, Lydia thinks, he’s paying far too much attention to the wrong dumpster fire. “There is no lesson,” she tells him. “This isn’t an after-school—we aren’t taking a class, Stiles. We’re making choices, and dealing with them.”

“This is one,” Stiles says. Less glib, though his focus hasn’t ever wavered throughout this conversation. 

“This is several,” Lydia says, and then sips some tea. “I’d think.”

“I think so too,” he says. He picks up his cup, then looks at it. Then snorts, and walks over to the sink to dump it out. “They think we came back for them.”

“Then that’s their choice,” Lydia shrugs.

Stiles glances over his shoulder. He gives his cup a little shake, still looking at her, and then sets it in the sink without rinsing it. Then he walks over to her. He puts his hands on her hips and smirks when she realizes he’s keeping it to fingertips only and relaxes. “Yeah,” he says. “But we did come back.”

“We—” she lowers her cup, so he has to stop leaning forward “—we made choices, Stiles.”

“We _like_ the choices, Lydia,” he says. He’s still hovering, his chin barely above the tea. “That’s the thing, right? We’re not just doing it because, we’re doing it because free will.”

“I like you,” Lydia says. She watches the way the light bends in his eyes. And then she smiles, and moves her cup to press her mouth against the corner of his. “I always did, Stiles. That wasn’t even a choice.”

It takes him a moment—one of the few things that make him pause—and then he laughs, and drops his hands, and steps back to look at her. “Okay, yeah, same. So…I think we both came to terms with that a while ago. And after that got straightened out, I guess it’s all just a bunch of self-actualization bullshit, honestly. So we’re us. Cool. And now I’m bored, and they’re all asleep.”

They literally only just reintroduced themselves to their industry, Lydia starts to say, and then she catches the irritation before it can get beyond a sharp look at him. Because he knows it’s coming, and he wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t already done something. Because Stiles.

“You’re right,” she says instead. She finishes her tea to give him time to recover from gaping at her. “So now what?”

Stiles coughs into his hand, then looks at her. It’s not sex, or love, or anything that simple, what ties them together. It wouldn’t matter what they did, or what they do, or what they are going to do—they just know the other will be there. He would never say she came back for him, just like she wouldn’t ever bother to tell him to come back to her. And that, Lydia thinks, is certainty enough.

“Let’s go do something?” he says.

“All right,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This series was harder than usual to finish off. I always planned to end with Lydia's POV, but trying to figure out how to do it took me the better part of two years. I would not consider this a _happy_ ending (certainly not if you pay attention to what parts of their lives Lydia and Stiles prioritize), but to me, at least, it feels accurate to the characterization.


End file.
